Tags: French Political Prisoners

This play is based on Charlotte Delbo’s trilogy of the same title and set in the third volume, “The Measure of Our Days.” Twenty years after liberation, a group of former French political prisoners, all women, hold a reunion in Paris where they discuss their shattered post-concentration camp lives. A chorus speaks to the audience on several occasions and flashbacks to Auschwitz, drawn from the first two volumes of the trilogy, demonstrate the tender care the women offer one another during moments of great suffering. Other flashbacks show how these starving and sick concentration camp inmates read poetry and performed theater as sustaining acts of defiant resistance to the massive Nazi system of dehumanization. The play had its first performance reading, directed by Nancy Simon, on January 20, 2016, in the Gesa Power House Theatre in Walla Walla, WA.