Tags: Dr. Yehuda Nir

Lost Childhood

A three-act, full-length opera based on Dr. Yehuda Nir’s memoir of his childhood hiding from the Nazis in Poland during World War II, and on conversations with Dr. Gottfried Wagner. When Nir’s father was arrested in 1941, Yehuda was eleven years old, and in order to survive, he, his mother, and his teenage sister moved from place to place disguised as Polish Catholics. In the opera, Yehuda’s character Judah Gruenfeld opens up after 50 years of silence to a colleague and psychiatrist, Manfred Geyer (portraying Dr. Wagner), a German born after World War II and the son of a prominent family of Nazi sympathizers. Manfred’s questions open the floodgates and memories come rushing back.