Browse the Plays
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- Experience Chronicled
- Allegoric or Metaphoric Representations
- Concentration and Extermination Camps
- Deniers and Denial
- Germany, Hitler and the Growth of Nazism
- European Jewry Before the Holocaust
- Escape
- The Ghettos
- Hiding
- Righteous Gentiles
- Rescue
- Resistance
- Liberation
- Nazi War Crimes and Judgement
- Other Victims of Nazi Persecution
- Perpetrators, Bystanders and Collaborators
- Survivors and Subsequent Generations
- Theater During Holocaust
- Women and the Holocaust
- Experience Chronicled
Tags: children
A. H. (Before He Changed Our History) [קורות חיים]
The play puts a spotlight on Adolf Hitler. How did a sensitive boy, who wanted to be a painter, become one of the most horrifying leaders in history? The text follows young Adolf from early childhood up to his thirties, when he joined the Nazi party.
And a Child Shall Lead
A true story of children living in the Terezín ghetto who, despite the horrors of Nazi rule, use their creativity to write poems, make art, and produce an underground newspaper. Their actual poems and stories are interwoven through the play.
Andorra
Andri has been told by his father, the town's teacher, that he is an adopted Jewish child saved from neighboring anti-Semites. However, unbeknownst to him, he is an illegitimate child of the teacher. At the start of the drama, Andri is engaged to the teacher's daughter, in reality his half sister. While the teacher tries to prevent their wedding, Andri becomes attacked by ant-Semites in his own community and invaders from the neighboring country. To try and save his son, the teacher reveals the truth but the town does not believe him and Andri is killed for being a Jew. Representatives of the town (none of whom are given names but, instead, titles signifying their occupations, except for the priest, rationalize their betrayal of the young man.
Auschwitz Oratorio
The play depicts the horrors of the Auschwitz maternity barracks through the use of a female chorus speaking in verse and a prisoner who serves as a midwife. The midwife recounts the details of infants drowned, bodies fed to rats, infants with Aryan features being taken for adoption, and newborns starved to death because their malnourished mothers are unable to breast-feed.
Behind a Closed Window
Stage adaptation of Holocaust survivor Nelly Toll's memoirs which recount her experiences as a nine-year-old girl in Lwow, who goes into hiding for thirteen months with a Christian family.
Born Guilty
A moving and elegiac play about one man's journey into the hearts of children raised by Nazi parents. As Peter, a Jewish journalist, digs into the past, he faces psychological barriers that threaten to bury the truth forever.
Brothers
A play for intermediate school students, Brothers is about family dislocation and reunion due to the Holocaust. Following the Nazis takeover of Poland and intensifying attacks on Jews, a Jewish family is only able to send one of their children to safety in Palestine. The drama focuses on the child's hardships alone in this new land and his eventual reunion with his surviving younger brother.
Can You Hear Them Crying?
A sequel to Children of the Holocaust, this one-act is a tribute to the thousands of children that did not survive their imprisonment at the Theresienstadt concentration camp. Of the 15,000 children who were sent to the camp, only 100 survived. The narrative features translations of actual stories and poems written by the lost children.
Children of the Holocaust
After World War II, over 200 children’s diaries like Anne Frank’s were found. What happened to these children? This play of remembrance speaks poignantly of the hopes and dreams of Anne, David, Rachael and Michael, victims of the Holocaust. It portrays their courage and their faith, and what they might have been had they lived.
Children of the Night
Children of the Night is a drama about the children in the orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto under Nazi occupation. It recounts the heroic acts of Dr. Janusz Korczak (1878–1942), who was the head of the ghetto’s orphanage from 1940 to 1942 and whose work, including the presentation of a Passover play which is depicted in this drama, was an attempt to bring normalcy and beauty, while reinforcing stories of Jewish heroism, into the lives of children who were facing imminent deportation and death.
Der Polenweiher
The suffering and eventual death of a young Polish peasant forced into working almost as a slave laborer on a farm is dramatized.
Dialogs: A Father and His Son; A Mother and Her Daughter; A Man and His Little Sister
In the three scenes or dialogs, “A Father and His Son,” “A Mother and Her Daughter,” and “A Man and His Little Sister” from the book A Jew Today by Elie Wiesel, we listen to the poignant and intimate conversations between loved ones in the moments before death. A survivor son talks to the spirit of his father who died during the Holocaust. Together they grapple with feelings of anger and sadness, realizing mankind’s reluctance to learn. A mother calms her daughter as they approach the gates of a concentration camp at night, knowing that their lives, as well as the lives of all those in front and behind them in the line, are about to end. And the older brother of a little girl promises he will never forget her as she perishes from cold. He reassures his sister that her memory will live on, and vows to find out who is responsible for her death. The scenes underscore the innocence of these ordinary people caught up in a struggle they cannot comprehend.
Drawing Life
Drawing Life, a Jewish Music Institute (JMI) production, is inspired by a collection of poems and drawings made by children imprisoned in Terezín. Based on original poems and drawings of the camp inmates, the performance is a dramatized song cycle featuring archive film and survivor testimony.
Face Forward: Growing up in Nazi Germany
An interview-based play about adolescence in Nazi Germany. Three young people struggle to claim their identities and transition into adulthood in this play about ethics, family, and self-perception. Marian's father wants to hide a Jewish family, but Marian just wants to fit in. Ernst joins the Hitler Youth but has trouble fully embracing the lifestyle. Rebecca endures discrimination from teachers and students for her Jewish heritage. No answers come easily as these three characters experience ordinary growing pains in the face of extraordinary historical tragedy.
Goodbye Memories
Based on the biographies of the Franks and Simons’ personal contact with Anne’s three surviving friends, Goodbye Memories is a universal story of parents, children, friends, sexual awakenings, and the special spirit of a talkative, attention-loving girl named Anne Frank. Unlike the play and movie based on Anne’s diary, Goodbye Memories begins on the morning of Anne’s 13th birthday in June 1942 when she receives her infamous diary. The play ends on the morning of July 6, 1942 when the Franks leave their home to go into hiding.
Hana’s Suitcase
A group of Japanese children wish to find out the story of the girl whose name is painted on an old battered suitcase from the Auschwitz Museum. It brings to light the life and fate of two Jewish children who lived in Czechoslovakia during the Nazi occupation. The play takes place between two time frames: Tokyo in 2000, when the children of the Holocaust Education Centre and its director, Fumiko Ishioka, began their search into the identity of Hana Brady; and Czechoslovakia in the 1930s and 40s, where Hana lived with her family, and ultimately became a victim of the Nazis.
Hanneke and Fiet
Based on a book by Ran Cohen-Harounoff, this is the story of his mother Hanneke, who, at age three, was separated from her parents and was taken into hiding in Amsterdam during World War II. She is moved from home to home because of the risk to the families that take her in. But when she finds herself in the home of one Dutch family, she forms a strong bond with the daughter Fiet. Hanneke is treated with love and kindness as if she were part of their family, and she remains in their home until the end of the war. Fiet’s parents promise Hanneke that her parents will come to get her when the war is over, and three years later they finally do.
Happy End [סוף טוב]
Set in Berlin before the outbreak of World War II, A Happy End tells the story of a cosmopolitan Jewish couple who are faced with the decision of whether to stay and face the danger of Nazi rule, or leave the city for safety. Both are convinced the Nazis will never come to power. Dr. Mark Erdmann, an acclaimed Jewish physicist at the University of Berlin is on the brink of an important discovery. His wife, Leah, is having an affair with his young assistant and living the good life in Berlin. They hold on to their lives in Berlin, even though all signs point to the dangers of staying. When Hitler becomes Reichskanzler, Mark is fired from his position at the university, and he and Leah are forced to make their final decision.
Herod’s Children
This play is about a group of children—with the wrong king of grandparents—in Nazi-dominated Vienna. They try to escape to freedom, to adjust to brutal, senseless regulations—or to console each other. They accept Ellen, the central character, dubiously. Her status is "Undetermined"—after all, she had only one, or possibly two, "wrong grandparents"—but she is Jewish by choice. Ellen brings her crayon-drawn visa to the American Consul to sign. "I can't let my mother go to America alone," she explains. "Who would she peel an apple for if I can't go? And whom would she slap when she can't bear it any more?" Ellen is so sensitive, loyal and courageous that she is dominant in the group. "It's all a matter of who your grandparents are" they explain to Ellen. But they wait by the river. A child might fall in. If they save it, perhaps they'll be allowed to sit on the park benches again like the other children—or even the merry-go-round! As they all proceed from childhood into their teens, the others are terrified by the war and the consequenses of wearing the Star. Ellen is determined at any cost to wear it. She sees and makes them see, too, that the yellow star with the tiny word 'JEW' in the center is the talisman that will lead to the blue city, New York, where love and peace abide.
Hidden: Stories from the Dutch Resistance
Seven lives intersect in this drama inspired by the true stories of rescuers and hidden children in Nazi-occupied Holland. The voices of the oppressed, the oppressors, and the quiet heroes come together to share their stories of defiance, celebrating hope, humanity and the hidden courage inside us all.
Hiding in the Open
An adaptation of Sabina Zimering's memoir, Hiding in the Open tells the true story of two Jewish sisters from Poland who assume false Catholic identities and work in a Nazi hotel during World War II. Living in constant fear of having their identities revealed, the sisters bravely face danger and the challenges of growing up while keeping their heritage a secret. This story of survival and teenage courage examines the bonds of family and human kindness in the face of great atrocities.
Hitler’s Childhood
Inspired by the writing of psychoanalyst Alice Miller, playwright Râdström focuses on Adolf Hitler’s dysfunctional childhood to offer insights into his progression to one of history’s most evil dictators.
Hitler’s Victims
In this single act drama, a Jewish boy who survived the horrors of the Third Reich is aided in confronting his Holocaust experience by the couple who has adopted him.
Home on the Mornin’ Train
1839, Talledega, Alabama: slavery is alive and doing quite well in the United States. 1939, Hamburg, Germany: Hitler has called for the extermination of Jews. Jewish children Rifka and Aaron are sent by their parents into hiding with the Westemeier family in rural Germany. Soon they are joined by other Jewish children, Baruch, David and Ledah. The plan is to take them by boat to safety in Denmark. While in hiding, the Jewish children read from a first-person account of a runaway teenage slave named Brave Mary. They learn of the history of slavery in the United States and Brave Mary's story of escaping an Alabama plantation in the 1830s. Brave Mary is joined in her escape by Katie-Mae and a young boy named Kindred.
The means of survival for both groups of children is the Underground Railroad.
The Westemeier's son, Karl, helps his father smuggle the Jewish children out of Germany. In America, Adelaide, the daughter of an abolitionist banker, gives asylum to runaway slaves on their flight to freedom. Olivia, a slave, puts herself in jeopardy as she uses her owner's boat to ferry blacks across the Ohio River. Trials and tribulations beset both groups of children. However, the Jewish children are inspired by the strength and courage of the black children trying to find their way to Canada, as they make their own way to Denmark. This play has songs that reflect African-American and Jewish cultures, and small pieces of dialogue are spoken in German, Yiddish and Hebrew.
I Believe in the Coming of the Messiah [אני מאמין בביאת המשיח]
Set in a ghetto and in an extermination camp, the play asks, “Where is God?” Everyday life in the ghetto is portrayed from the women and children’s point of view. Conditions are bad, and the women seek help from the Judenrat, but there are no shelters. The kids, led by a child named Yossifun, play and build tents, solving the women’s problem of housing. A German officer offers to “help” the children, and takes them all from the ghetto. They travel by train to a camp where they are told to go to the showers, but they know these are the gas chambers. As Yossifun and his mother are heading for the showers, they hear singing about the coming of the Messiah. Yossifun’s mother manages to cheer him up, saying the Messiah is close, and they sing as they enter the gas chambers.
I Love You, I Love You Not
A teenager learns to accept and honor her Jewish heritage. Daisy is visiting her grandmother at her home. Daisy is unhappy with herself and and her family life. Her grandmother provides her with emotional stability by providing her with grandmotherly advice and support but, most importantly, by recounting her experiences in Auschwitz where she lost her two sisters.
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
A one-act play that is based on the poetry written by Jewish children from Prague imprisoned in the model concentration camp Theresienstadt. The play chronicles the experiences of Raja, a girl in Thersienstadt, her family, a teacher, who encourages children's creativity, a young male friend, with whom Raja creates an underground newspaper, and a Terezín rabbi.
I Never Saw Another Butterfly
This devised play takes a retrospective look at the journey to the genocide through the eyes of the children of Theresienstadt. From the humiliations on the streets of German cities, the synagogue burnings and the Einsatzgruppen to the wide and varied forms of resistance that people found and took in response to the devastating events of this period. Jewish festivals and cultural values are embedded in the children’s story, which ends on their arrival at Auschwitz in 1944.
I Shall Not Die, But Live [לא אמות כי אחיה]
Abraham is living in the Soviet Union. He lost one son in WWI and a second son in the current world war. When the Nazis invade, a professor who works with Abraham tells him he is also Jewish. He plans to commit suicide in order to escape the Nazi's persecution. Abraham argues with him, asking him what about his daughter and grandchildren: Should they commit suicide as well? The professor thinks Abraham is safe because he managed to become one of the nation through the sacrifice of his children. They argue.
Janusz Korczak [יאנוש קורצ’ק]
The play tells the story of the educator and Jewish doctor, Janusz Korczak, who ran an orphanage in the Warsaw ghetto. Korczak had a unique method of working with children, and even though he could have been saved, he went to the gas chambers with the orphans he protected.
Kindertransport
Kindertransport is based on the experiences of children who were allowed to leave Nazi Germany for England in 1938/39 and who were separated from their families, many of whom perished during the Holocaust. Through flashbacks, the play presents the hardships faced by Eva, a nine-year-old child sent on a Kindertransport and taken in by a British family. The play also focuses on the now assimilated and completely dislocated Eva’s alienation from her actual mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, and the discovery by Faith, Eva’s daughter, of her mother’s unspoken past.
King Matt in the Ghetto [המלך מתיא בגטו]
A group of children in a ghetto is staging King Matt the First, a famous book by Janusz Korczak, just before they are sent to their deaths.
Korczak’s Children
World War Two, the Nazi Occupation of Poland, Dr. Janusz Korczak—writer, educator, physician, and passionate advocate for children—tries to keep the 200 Jewish boys and girls of his famed Warsaw orphanage alive and hopeful in the face of unbelievable deprivation and terror. In the horrible conditions of the Jewish Ghetto, Korczak does everything within his power to make sure his children are fed and clothed, cared for and safe. But there are rumors of a change in the ghetto. Tales of deportations to concentration camps are spreading. Korczak knows time may be running out. Against the rules of the ghetto, he permits his orphans to stage a magical play—The Post Office—to teach them about the one adult subject he has not yet broached with them: death. As the play is rehearsed, the rumors become reality, and Korczak must decide who can be saved and who must go on the final journey together.
Lady of the Castle [בעלת הארמון]
In 1947, at the end of the war, two emissaries from the Jewish community in Israel are searching for and bringing back Jewish children who survived the Holocaust. They encounter an Eastern European aristocrat who continues to keep a Jewish girl in hiding after the war has ended. They arrive on a stormy night to an old castle, which was used as a Nazi headquarters during the war, but is now a museum. Its previous owner, Count Zabrodski, was allowed to stay as the castle's keeper. They stay the night and discover by accident Lena, a Jewish girl whom Zabrodski hid from the Nazis because he was in love with her. Zabrodski doesn’t tell Lena the war ended two years ago because he doesn’t want her to leave him. Dora and Michael tell her the truth, which she has a hard time accepting. But she is persuaded, and leaves with them to Israel.
Lech Lecha=Go Forth
The play, written for intermediate school students, chronicles the changing circumstance of two young Jewish girls: one leaves for Palestine, the other remains in Nazi Germany. The play employs flashbacks to present their former lives and the events leading to their separation.
Life in a Jar
A play written by students from a rural Kansas school as a result of a research project for National History Day. Two ninth graders, Megan Stewart and Elizabeth Cambers, and an eleventh grader, Sabrina Coons researched the story of Irena Sendler, a Polish social worker in the Warsaw Ghetto who, between 1939 and 1942, helped rescue children from the ghetto by smuggling them past Nazi guards. Sendler then adopted the children into Polish homes or orphanages by giving them false identity papers. She and her network made lists of the children’s real names and put the lists in jars, which were then buried in a Warsaw garden under an apple tree so that the names could one day be used to help the children find their true identity and reconnect with their families after the war. The play has been performed over 300 times in the U.S. and Europe, and the students made several visits to Poland to meet Irena before she passed away in 2008.
Luba
The play tells the story of Luba, 19, and her younger brother Meesha, 16, fleeing their home in Dubno, Poland (now Ukraine), ahead of the advancing German armies in June 1941. It depicts their hair-raising experiences of traveling to, and life as refugees deep in, the Soviet Union. The play covers episodes of their one-and-a-half-year stay among the Uzbeks in a small town near Samarkand, Uzbekistan. It focuses on Luba as the main protagonist and her valiant exploits as she risks her life to search for Meesha and, finding him in an army training center, engineers his dangerous escape.
Me-afelah le’or Gadol
A sequel to Lech Lecha=Go Forth. The play continues to chronicle the lives of the two German Jewish girls, whose lives and destinies were impacted by choices made while living under the Third Reich.
Mister Fugue, or Earth Sick [Monsieur Fugue, ou le mal de terre]
The play dramatizes the trip of four children, sentenced to death by Nazis, in a truck on the way to their slaughter. The children act out future life events they have heard from their parents. They are accompanied by a German soldier, who is convicted of assisting Jewish children, and who is also on his way to the death camp. The character of Mr. Fugue, the German soldier, is ironically based on Janusz Korczak, who ran the ghetto orphanage in Warsaw, and who accompanied his children to the Treblinka extermination center.
No Fading Star
In a monastery in Germany in 1943, there is an underground hiding and transporting Jewish children. David, a Jewish child, wishes to return to the ghetto from which he has been saved so that he can complete his bar mitzvah and proclaim his Jewish identity. Instead Mother Franziska helps David complete his bar mitzvah in the convent just as the local Nazi commandant intrudes to arrest the nun. David, however, is able to escape.
On Lambs and Wolves [על שיות וזאבים]
Yashek is a Jewish boy who survived the Holocaust by being raised by his gentile nanny and her husband—who also christened him, giving him his name. But his birth name is Avner, and he is brought to Israel, and put in school. Yashek-Avner has a hard time adjusting, and the kids harass him.
Our Class
Our Class follows the lives of 10 school children—Catholic and Jewish—growing up in a small town in Poland. Beginning in 1925, the children are full of friendship and hope for the future. But when World War II breaks out, Soviets, then Nazis, invade the town and everything changes. Anti-Semitism creates a divide and leads to persecution and violence, culminating in a mass murder where the Jewish inhabitants are burned in a barn or murdered in the town square. The play questions how ordinary people, once friends, could commit such horrific acts.
Punch Me in the Stomach
A one-woman performance piece, in which Filler describes her childhood in a Jewish immigrant family in New Zealand and the experience of actually traveling back to Eastern Europe to tour the death camps with her father who was a survivor of Auschwitz.
Remember My Name
A young Jewish French girl is separated from her family and becomes a fighter for her homeland and her own survival, protected by a priest, a widow, and a teacher, who is a member of the French resistance. A Nazi officer unsuccessfully attempts to capture the girl and those who are aiding her.
Rose Colored Glass
Set in 1938 Chicago, Rose Colored Glass, takes place in the back rooms of Lady O'Riley's and Rose Fleishman's delicatessen. Their disparate worlds, separated by much more than the alley between their kitchens, are about to collide. Peg O'Riley, the 13-year-old granddaughter of Lady, has grown determined that these two mistrustful widows will become friends, but it is not until they become involved in the same cause that their friendship has a chance to bloom. In a series of flashbacks, Peg now older, remembers the moving story of how Lady and Rose formed a united front to fight American apathy in an attempt to bring Rose's nephew out of Europe before the war. Rose Colored Glass shows the beginning of the Holocaust from the other side of the Atlantic, and how two women struggle not only with American apathy, but also with immigration laws and bureaucracy, in addition to their own prejudices... all in the name of one boy's safe passage from Europe to America.
Rosenfeld’s War
A docudrama in which six actors take on the roles of 150 historic figures and which dramatizes the failure of Congress to pass legislation in 1939 that would have permitted 20,000 German Jewish children to emigrate to the United States. The play uses actual excerpts from the Congressional hearings to illustrate prevalent anti-Semitism and xenophobia in the country at that time.
Second Hand Smoke
Dramatizes the story of the second-hand effects on the children of Holocaust survivors.
Shadows of the Holocaust
Written for young audiences, the work is a collection of short dramas that chronicle the experiences of children in the Jewish ghettos and Nazi concentration camps. The published work is described as "an unusual collection of plays, poems, and other pieces that can be used to commemorate the Holocaust."
Silence
Part of Proceed to Checkout: Ten Death Affirming Plays, Sketches and Monolgues, this 10 minute play asks the question: Could there be something worse than surviving the Holocaust? Two elderly Russian survivors struggle to come to terms with the death of their only son.
Silent Witnesses
Decades after World War II, a group of women meet, moderated by a therapist. The women have one thing in common: all of them, including the therapist, survived the Holocaust as children. Expected to quietly assimilate and to not dwell on the past, they remained silent for years. Even the camp survivors wrote them off: “They were kids, they were hidden; nothing really happened to them.” Now, they begin to tell their stories for the first time: tales of vanished loved ones, privation, shame and sorrow. Now, in the safety of Dana’s home office, the boundaries between therapist, friend and co-survivor all disappear. Silent Witnesses is not the story of victims. It is an uplifting story of survival. Based on interviews and conversations with child survivors, these stories are unique in the realm of Holocaust narratives. Their memories were shaped through a child’s lens, yet infused with the wisdom of the adults they’ve become.
The Book Thief
Adapted by Heidi Stillman from Markus Zusak’s book, the story is narrated by a Death figure who is haunted by humans, and who tries alongside the audience to understand why people do the terrible and generous things they do. Liesel Meminger comes to live with adoptive parents in Nazi Germany. Over the course of the Second World War, she blooms from a tight-lipped, nightmare-ridden girl to a poised young woman who commits several acts of book thievery as she learns to read, keep important secrets, and heil Hitler whether she wants to or not.
The Children’s Republic
Dr. Janusz Korczak is protecting Polish-Jewish children in a Warsaw orphanage: a violin prodigy, a troublemaker, a young girl abandoned by her mother, and a malnourished boy all struggle to survive. Even with the known end looming, we are engaged in the everyday details of keeping the children alive.
The Library
A short drama for young audiences—a librarian in the United States looks back at her childhood in the Third Reich when she is forced to give up her library privileges because she is a Jew.
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The Little People
Written by a leading Jewish educator, the play depicts Jewish children, French partisans, and Jewish resistance fighters who are being hidden by a heroic French couple just before the arrival of the Allies. The young Jews assist in their own liberation by thwarting the German's attempt to destroy a vital bridge needed for passage.
The Nazi’s Jewish Daughter [Dem natsis yidishe tokhter]
A Yiddish melodrama that chronicles the story of a German who prior to the rise of the Third Reich adopts a Jewish child and then as a member of the Nazi party is forced to conceal her background from the beginning of the Reich through the end of World War II.
The Promised Land
This two act drama is derived from Bertolt Brecht's ballad The Children's Crusade, which chronicles the travels and struggles of 150 children who search for peace throughout war ravaged Poland and who all die doing so. The play opens with the execution of two elderly peasants and a young wife and husband, whose infant child has died of starvation, by Nazi soldiers; their ten-year-old daughter leaves her hiding place and finds their bodies. She is joined by a fifteen-year-old boy whose parents were also killed. And so begins the organizing and journey of the children. Throughout the play, parts of Brecht's original work are heard delivered by an unseen narrator.
The Secret Window
A highly theatrical musical adaptation of the Holocaust memoirs of Nelly Toll, who survived the Nazi occupation of Lwow by spending thirteen months in hiding with a Christian family. The story is told through a series of tableaux accompanied by song and a limited number of musical instruments. The work, co-commissioned for the Annenberg Center's Festival Theatre for New Plays and its Children's Theatre Festival, was created with Rotterdam's Het Waterhuis.
The Treasure
Three children and the clown Kašpárek/Kasperle travel to Africa in search of a treasure, live with an Arabic-speaking tribe in the village of Aljanin, and return to Europe with a discovery that saves even the poorest from hunger: the potato. Due to the portrayals of the African characters the script would need extensive adaptation to be performed today. Although the notion of finding a new source of food was clearly relevant to the prisoners’ situation in the ghetto, The Treasure has few other connections with the world of Terezín/Theresienstadt. Perhaps it served what one survivor called the most important function of theater for children: “We needed to divert them. So that they would simply forget about everything around them. Because when a person simply fixated on what was happening in front of him, he forgot about all the rest.”
The Village, an Opera in Two Acts
The opera is based on the Holocaust experiences of the husband of the author of the libretto who, with his younger brother, was hidden from the Nazis on an estate just outside Paris. In the opera, the Jewish boy, David Cohen, is hidden by a Gentile family in a Normandy town the Nazis eventually occupy, and, as liberation becomes imminent, there is greater danger that the child will be discovered.
The Young Guard
A play for young audiences about an underground youth resistance organization called The Young Guard operating in Krasnodon, Russia during the German occupation of WWII. As the story of these teenagers unfolds, the group is betrayed; many of its members are captured, interrogated by the Gestapo, and executed. Based on fact, The Young Guard portrays the bravery and heroism of these young people.
Under the Apple Tree
Over 2,500 Jewish children were rescued from the Warsaw Ghetto by Polish nurse and social worker, Irena Sendler. At great personal risk, she smuggled children out of the ghetto providing them with false identity papers and keeping their true identities safe in the hopes of reuniting them with their families when the war ended. Their names were kept in glass jars and buried under the apple tree of a house in Warsaw.
Under the Domim Tree [עץ הדומים תפוס]
Based on the book by the same name, which is the sequel to The Summer of Aviya. Aviya is a student in a Hadasim boarding school. In her group there are only two Sabra (Israeli born): Aviya and her best friend. The rest of the kids are survivors, orphans, troubled by their past and present. Every kid has their own hardship, and in dealing with their problems they become a stronger group. Aviya is a bit of an outsider, because she is "normal," but she exposes her own harsh story to the boy she loves, and they become a couple.
What Does Peace Mean?
A play for secondary school audiences, What Does Peace Mean? Takes place in a home just outside a Nazi concentration in Germany in the last year of World War II. Four camp prisoners are taken to the home; they are unsure of why they are there with one of the young females believing that they are to be used for the pleasure of the SS. However, the camp is liberated by British soldiers. When the camp commandant’s son comes to the house seeking safety from the soldiers liberating the camp, he is tried as a war criminal by the freed children. However, when the son is threatened by the British, the young camp prisoners protect him.