Tags: Bergen-Belsen

Anne & Emmett

Two teenagers, Anne Frank and Emmett Till, have an imaginary meeting in Memory, a place where they are free from their past suffering. During their meeting, they recount how they died. Anne Frank tells how she hid in an attic in Amsterdam until she and her family were found and taken to Bergen-Belsen, where she later died of typhus. Emmett Till, an African-American teenager, tells how he was brutally murdered in Mississippi 1955 by a group of racists. The encounter draws similarities between their harrowing experiences of racism.

The Girl on the Other Side of the Fence

WWII: Karl Koehler, a shy and deeply religious German farmhand, is drafted to deliver packages in the area around the Bergen-Belsen camp. Aware of the suffering of the inmates, he throws food and clothing over the fence, against the will of his wife, who is in physical and emotional survival mode. At the last encounter at the fence, Karl, about to be sent to Russia, and the girl (Anne Frank), deadly sick with typhus, together with 8 other Jewish inmates, reach out toward each other across the fence for a heart-stopping minyan, coming together in a rare moment of Jewish-Christian togetherness.

The Phoenix Cantata

The play is based on the experiences of Violet Czodik Fabian and her sister Gabriella Czodik in Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. This true story depicts the choices Violet has to make after being liberated from Bergen-Belsen. Does she marry a fellow survivor and carry on the life she had before? Or does she choose a Catholic man who, as a medical student, is helping to save the lives of prisoners who are too sick to leave the liberated camps?