Staging Holocaust Resistance

272 Pages·2012·1.717 MB·English

by  Gene A. Plunka

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Also in the series:
Undressed for Success by Brenda Foley
Th eatre, Performance, and the Historical Avant- garde by Günter Berghaus
Th eatre, Politics, and Markets in Fin- de- Siècle Paris by Sally Charnow
Ghosts of Th eatre and Cinema in the Brain by Mark Pizzato
Moscow Th eatres for Young People by Manon van de Water
Absence and Memory in Colonial American Th eatre by Odai Johnson
Vaudeville Wars: How the Keith- Albee and Orpheum Circuits Controlled the
Big- Time and Its Performers by Arthur Frank Wertheim
Performance and Femininity in Eighteenth- Century German Women’s Writing
by Wendy Arons
Operatic China: Staging Chinese Identity across the Pacifi c by Daphne P. Lei
Transatlantic Stage Stars in Vaudeville and Variety: Celebrity Turns
by Leigh Woods
Interrogating America through Th eatre and Performance edited by William W.
Demastes and Iris Smith Fischer
Plays in American Periodicals, 1890–1918 by Susan Harris Smith
Representation and Identity from Versailles to the Present: Th e Performing Subject
by Alan Sikes
Directors and the New Musical Drama: British and American Musical Th eatre
in the 1980s and 90s by Miranda Lundskaer- Nielsen
Beyond the Golden Door: Jewish- American Drama and Jewish- American
Experience by Julius Novick
American Puppet Modernism: Essays on the Material World in Performance
by John Bell
On the Uses of the Fantastic in Modern Th eatre: Cocteau, Oedipus, and the
Monster by Irene Eynat- Confi no
Staging Stigma: A Critical Examination of the American Freak Show
by Michael M. Chemers, foreword by Jim Ferris
Performing Magic on the Western Stage: From the Eighteenth- Century to the
Present edited by Francesca Coppa, Larry Hass, and James Peck, foreword
by Eugene Burger
Memory in Play: From Aeschylus to Sam Shepard by Attilio Favorini
Danjūrō’s Girls: Women on the Kabuki Stage by Loren Edelson
Mendel’s Th eatre: Heredity, Eugenics, and Early Twentieth- Century American
Drama by Tamsen Wolff
Th eatre and Religion on Krishna’s Stage: Performing in Vrindavan
by David V. Mason
Rogue Performances: Staging the Underclasses in Early American Th eatre Culture
by Peter P. Reed
Broadway and Corporate Capitalism: Th e Rise of the Professional- Managerial
Class, 1900–1920 by Michael Schwartz
Lady Macbeth in America: From the Stage to the White House by Gay Smith
Performing Bodies in Pain: Medieval and Post- Modern Martyrs, Mystics, and
Artists by Marla Carlson
Early- Twentieth- Century Frontier Dramas on Broadway: Situating the Western
Experience in Performing Arts by Richard Wattenberg
Staging the People: Community and Identity in the Federal Th eatre Project
by Elizabeth A. Osborne
Russian Culture and Th eatrical Performance in America, 1891–1933
by Valleri J. Hohman
Baggy Pants Comedy: Burlesque and the Oral Tradition by Andrew Davis
Transposing Broadway: Jews, Assimilation, and the American Musical
by Stuart J. Hecht
Th e Drama of Marriage: Gay Playwrights/Straight Unions from Oscar
Wilde to the Present by John M. Clum
Mei Lanfang and the Twentieth- Century International Stage: Chinese
Th eatre Placed and Displaced by Min Tian
Hijikata Tatsumi and Butoh: Dancing in a Pool of Gray Grits by Bruce Baird
Staging Holocaust Resistance by Gene A. Plunka
Staging Holocaust Resistance
Gene A. Plunka
STAGING HOLOCAUST RESISTANCE
Copyright © Gene A. Plunka, 2012.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2012 978-0-230-36956-6
All rights reserved.
First published in 2012 by
PALGRAVE MACMILLAN®
in the United States— a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC,
175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.
Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the World,
this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited,
registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills,
Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS.
Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies
and has companies and representatives throughout the world.
Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States,
the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries.
ISBN 978-1-349-35055-1 ISBN 978-1-137-00061-3 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9781137000613
Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data
Plunka, Gene A., 1949–
Staging Holocaust resistance / Gene A. Plunka.
p. cm.—(Palgrave studies in theatre and performance history)
1. Holocaust, Jewish (1939–1945), in literature. 2. Underground
movements in literature. 3. Drama—20th century—History and
criticism. 4. World War, 1939–1945—Literature and the war.
I. Title.
PN1650.H64P58 2012
809.2(cid:2)9358405318—dc23 2011044510
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India.
First edition: May 2012
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Acknowledgments vii
1 . Introduction 1
2 . German Resistance: Carl Zuckmayer’s Des Teufels General 25
3 . The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising 4 5
4 . Rescuing Jews in Western and Eastern Europe: Lois Lowry’s/
Douglas W. Larche’s N umber the Stars and Julian Garner’s
The Flight into Egypt 6 3
5 . Resistance in the Extermination Camps: Susan B. Katz’s
Courage Untold 8 9
6 . Resistance from the Clergy 1 03
7 . Staging America’s Response to the Holocaust: Susan
Lieberman and Stephen J. Morewitz’s Steamship Quanza 1 35
8 . Aharon Megged’s Hanna Senesh 1 55
9 . The Saga of Raoul Wallenberg: Nicholas Wenckheim’s
Image and Likeness 1 65
10 . The Legacy of Dr. Janusz Korczak 1 87
11 . Conclusion 2 07
Notes 2 11
Bibliography 2 43
Index 2 55
Acknowledgments
Iw ould like to thank Dr. Eric Link, chair of the Department of English
at the University of Memphis, for granting me a reduced teaching load,
which expedited my completion of the manuscript. A University of
Memphis Faculty Research Grant and a Professional Development Award
(PDA) allowed me to finish the writing and edit the manuscript.
I am indebted to Wayne Key of the University of Memphis Interlibrary
Loan Office for his valuable assistance in ordering difficult-to-obtain
journals and books. I also want to acknowledge Caroline Waddell, photo
archivist at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, for providing the
cover photo and permission for its use. In addition, I want to thank ref-
eree Dr. Eric Sterling for the valuable editorial suggestions that he made,
which certainly strengthened the quality of the manuscript. Moreover,
I appreciate the research conducted by Vincent Slatt, librarian at the
U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, who provided information about
the locksmith Zalcberg in Treblinka and Dimo Kazasov of Bulgaria.
Furthermore, I very much appreciate the diligent work of Samantha
Hasey, theater and performing arts editor at Palgrave Macmillan, for
securing referees and moving the manuscript forward in the early stages
of production.
T his book could not have been written without the help of novelist
Lois Lowry and playwrights Douglas W. Larche, Susan B. Katz, Arthur
Giron, David Gooderson, Susan Lieberman, Stephen Morewitz, Nicholas
Wenckheim, Michael Brady, and Gabriel Emanuel. Through telephone
conversations or email messages, these writers provided vital information
that greatly enhanced the quality of the book. I particularly want to thank
both Mr. Wenckheim for his insightful comments about my chapter on
Image and Likeness and David Morewitz (Stephen’s uncle) for his metic-
ulous fact checking of detailed historical information in the chapter on
Steamship Quanza .
viii Acknowledgments
Finally, I want to express my gratitude to Dr. Stephen Tabachnick,
Dr. Jackson R. Bryer, Dr. Brad McAdon, Dr. Cynthia Tucker, Mark
Lapidus, Stanley Plunka and his wife Rhona, Harry R. Plunka, and Lillian
Siegel for their encouragement and support. By constantly inquiring about
the status of my research, my friends, relatives, and colleagues made the
book much easier for me to complete.
1. Introduction
The Nazi reign from 1933 to 1945 resulted in the genocide of
Germans with disabilities, Gypsies (Sinti and Roma), homosexuals,
Seventh Day Adventists, political dissenters, and other “threats” to
the Volk, including the deaths of approximately six million European Jews.
The total number of noncombat deaths during the Holocaust, including
murder through massacres, bombings, and killing squads; starvation and
disease in the ghettoes; and assembly-line execution in the extermination
camps ranges as high as twenty million. 1
The Holocaust has been viewed as the seminal event of the twentieth
century that changed the way we view humanity: if the Germans, with
arguably one of the best university systems in the world (and hence an edu-
cated population) and certainly one of the most cultured societies in the
twentieth century, could commit sanctioned mass murder and persecution
based upon the notion of racial purity, then humans cannot be good at
heart. Assuredly, the Holocaust, dominated by the systematic suffering,
degradation, humiliation, and finally the murder of Jews, implies that if
humans were good at heart, the Shoah, a product of National Socialism
that could not have had such devastating results without the help of thou-
sands of willing non-German accomplices throughout Europe, would
never have occurred. The Holocaust, the total destruction of Jews and
their culture, can be viewed only as barbaric. As Alvin H. Rosenfeld notes,
“Moreover, ‘Holocaust’ suggests not only a brutally imposed death but an
even more brutally imposed life of humiliation, deprivation, and degrada-
tion before the time of dying.”2
T heodor W. Adorno stated that to write a poem after Auschwitz was
itself a barbaric act since art was incapable of conveying a humanistic per-
spective after the horrors of the Holocaust. Adorno acknowledged that the
human mind is incapable of objectifying what is incomprehensible about
man’s brutality: “The somatic, unmeaningful stratum of life is the stage
of suffering, of the suffering which in the camps, without any consolation,
burned every soothing feature out of the mind, and out of culture, the
2 Staging Holocaust Resistance
mind’s objectification.” 3 Elie Wiesel concurs, admitting, “At Auschwitz,
not only man died, but also the idea of man.”4 Most Holocaust scholars
and artists have tempered Adorno’s dictum with the need to remember
this unique historical event in writing so as to pay homage to the victims.
Geoffrey H. Hartman asserts that the Holocaust must not be allowed
to fade from consciousness “because of its magnitude, its blatant crimi-
nality, its coordinated exploitation of all modern resources, cultural and
technological, and the signal it sends how quickly racist feelings can be
mobilized.” 5 The brutality of the Shoah suggests that Holocaust writ-
ing must be recognized, as Lawrence L. Langer argued, as literature of
atrocity. 6 Sidra DeKoven Ezrahi then wonders whether the response to
Adorno is to find “a literature that is commensurately degenerate” to the
cultural and social debasement that culminated in Auschwitz. 7
I s the Holocaust all doom and destruction, or was there a spirit of hero-
ism and moral defiance amid the suffering and eventual genocide? Langer
comments that for the victims of the ghettoes, concentration camps, labor
camps, and extermination camps, “the human spirit faltered, and the
human body, bereft of support, succumbed to an annihilation it no longer
had the power to prevent.”8 Relying primarily on German sources, histo-
rian Raul Hilberg depicts the Holocaust as widespread devastation with
very slight Jewish resistance. 9 Hilberg writes, “On a Europeanwide scale
the Jews had no resistance organization, no blueprint for armed action, no
plan even for psychological warfare.”1 0 Hilberg argues that the Jews were
not oriented toward resistance and instead resorted to activities that were
designed to alleviate danger, including preparing petitions and various
oral or written forms of appeal, making protection payments or ransom
arrangements, organizing relief and rescue operations, and complying with
Nazi orders. Jews saw themselves as persecuted throughout history, with
the Third Reich representing merely another phase in the degradation;
provoking the Nazis would only lead inevitably to more Jewish deaths, and
so Jews were thus seen as trying to placate, and thus tame, the savage beasts
by complying with decrees.1 1 Writing after the Eichmann trial in Jerusalem
during 1961 and thus relying on Israeli and German documents, Hannah
Arendt corroborates Hilberg’s assessment of Jewish complicity with Nazi
orders. Arendt characterizes Jewish behavior during the Holocaust as
submissive rather than heroic: Jews arrived on time at the transportation
depots, undressed and made neat piles of their clothing while awaiting
execution, and even dug their own graves.1 2 Moreover, Arendt asserts that
the Jewish police and Judenräte (Jewish Councils) assisting the Nazis dis-
tributed the Yellow Star badges, compiled lists of persons for deportation,