Theatrical Performance, Survivor Testimony and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1963 A DISSERTATION ...

295 Pages·2009·1.45 MB·English

The Prosthetic Life:
Theatrical Performance, Survivor Testimony
and the Terezín Ghetto, 1941-1963

A DISSERTATION
SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL
OF THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA
BY

Lisa A. Peschel

IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS
FOR THE DEGREE OF
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY

Dr. Margaret Werry
Associate Professor of Theatre Arts and Dance
Advisor

October 2009
© Lisa A. Peschel, October 2009
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Acknowledgements

I would like to express my thanks to many people and organizations who helped make
this dissertation a reality.
My greatest debt of thanks is due to the survivors of the Terezín ghetto.
Although in the dissertation itself I have analyzed only a fraction of the testimony I
have collected, I am grateful to all of those who have testified to their experience and
look forward to engaging with their narratives in more depth as this project continues to
unfold. I am especially grateful to those survivors and their contemporaries who have
granted me personal interviews in recent years, for they have shaped my interpretation
in fundamental ways:
Shulamit Amir, Edna and Arie Amit, Hilda Arnsteinová, Ziv Bacharach, Věra
Bednářová, Michal (Maudka) Beer, Kitty Berger, Jiří Schmuel Bloch, Ruth Bobek,
Miloslava Dohnalová, Michal Efrat, Zdenka Ehrlich-Fantlová, Walter Fantl-Brumlík,
Marianna Foltýnová, Rudi Gelbard, Helena Glancová, Martin Glas, Eva Gross, Doris
Grozdanovičová, Anna Hanusová-Flachová, Eva Herrmannová, Jarmila Horálková,
Margarethe Horowitz-Trentini, Helga Hošková, Anna Hyndráková, Zuzana Justman,
Helga Kinsky, Greta Klingsberg, Dita Kraus, Grete Lendvay, Dagmar Lieblová, Anna
Lorencová, Eva Lukash, Leo Luster, Max Mannheimer, Evelyna Merová, Miriam
Merzbacher-Blumenthal, Bernhard Morgenstern, Bohumil Porges, Irena Ravelová, Eva
and Jan Roček, Eva Roubíčková, Zuzana Růžičková, Marietta Ryba, Alisah Schiller,
Margit Silberfeld, Alice Sommer-Herz, Ruth Stein, Věra Steinerová, Edith Stern, Alena
Sternová, Pavel Stránský, Věra Vrbová, Suzie and Freddie Weiss, Ela Weissberger, and
Raja Žádníkova.
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Several witnesses who played key roles in this project did not live to see the
completion of the dissertation. I would like to remember them here: Rahel Ardon,
Karel Berka, Gavriel Dagan, Ruth Elias, Jiří Franěk, Petr Herrmann, Kurt Jiří Kotouč,
Marianna Müllerová, Eva Musilová, Alena Munková, Hana Pravdová, and Alisa
Scheck.
During the final research and writing of the dissertation I focused mainly on a
small group of survivors who gave testimony in multiple postwar periods, most of
whom I was able to interview personally. Although not all of their testimony is
included in this final draft, I am grateful for the depth of perspective that they provided
me and also for their friendship and the help of their spouses and family members:
Luděk Eliáš, his daughter Martina Eliášová and his late wife Eva Eliášová, his
sister-in-law Kate Elias and his niece Dorothy Elias; Jan Fischer and his daughter Taňa
Fischerová (I am grateful to Jan Fischer as well for his essay, which appears in the
Foreword); Hana Lojínová, her sister and fellow survivor Lilka Trojanová and brother-
in-law Jindřich Trojan; František Miška; Hana Reinerová, whom I was fortunate to
interview several times before her death in 2007, her late husband Karel Reiner, who is
a living presence in this work, and their daughters Kateřina Reinerová and Michaela
Schleifová. The testimony of two more survivors who passed away before this project
began has been tremendously influential, and thanks to their friends and family they
have become vivid personalities for me: Kamila Ronová (Rosenbaumová), whose
daughter Kate Rys has generously provided me with information and access to family
documents, and Jana Šedová (Truda Popperová), whom all her fellow actors described
with great affection.
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Several organizations have supported this project financially in various ways.
The J. W. Fulbright Commission provided the grant for my first research year in the
Czech Republic and I am grateful to the whole staff of the Fulbright office in Prague for
their support and friendship. A fellowship from the Institute for Czech Literature of the
Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic and South Bohemian University enabled
me to stay in the Czech Republic and conduct additional research for this project and
two others regarding the plays written in the ghetto and also provided me with a
network of congenial colleagues with whom I look forward to working for years to
come. A P.E.O. Sisterhood Scholar Award and a Shevlin Fellowship from the
University of Minnesota provided me with vital financial support during the writing of
the dissertation. Additional grants from the University of Minnesota (The Alexander
Dubček Fund through the Office of International Programs, a Doctoral Dissertation
International Research Grant from the Graduate School, a Center for Jewish Studies
Jerome Joss Graduate Student Research Grant, and several Foreign Language and Area
Studies Fellowships administered through the Institute for Global Studies) supported
my research. I have very much appreciated support from the Department of Theatre
Arts and Dance, including the Oscar Firkins Scholarship, Elsie Kelley Lindquist
Scholarship and Century Council Theatre History/Theory Award and additional tuition
and travel grants that have enhanced my scholarship.
Several institutions in the Czech Republic eased my stay. I would like to thank
all my advisors and colleagues at Charles University and the Theater Institute in Prague,
Masaryk University and the theater department of the Janáček Academy of Musical
Arts in Brno. Special thanks to the Institute of the Terezín Initiative, the Terezín
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Memorial, the Jewish Museum in Prague and the National Archives for making their
expertise and their libraries and collections available to me. The Educational and
Cultural Center of the Jewish Museum in Prague and its branch in Brno provided
invaluable opportunities for me to present the early results of my research to the
survivor community, and the Terezín survivor organization, the Terezín Initiative,
provided invaluable assistance at several points in this project.
I beg the indulgence of my colleagues at the above institutions for not
mentioning them all by name, and I look forward to thanking them in person soon. Here
I will mention just a few who have been incredibly generous with their time and
scholarship in ways that were essential to my work. I would like to thank PhDr.
Jaroslava Milotová, CSc. of the Institute of the Terezín Initiative for our many
conversations about Czech and US views of the history of Terezín, prof. PhDr. Bořivoj
Srba, DrSc. for his extensive scholarship on a wide range of Czech theatrical
performance during World War II, and PhDr. Eva Šormová, CSc. of the Theater
Institute, for her groundbreaking work on Terezín theater and for generously providing
me with her notes from 1963 as well as with invaluable advice on interpreting the
testimony. I would also like to thank PhDr. Dagmar Lieblová of the Terezín Initiative
for her long friendship and for all her help in gaining me access to the survivor
community, Mgr. Blanka Kynclová and her whole family for brilliant transcriptions of
my interview tapes, and Petr Brod, for supplying me with an unending stream of hard-
to-find resources and invaluable advice.
I am grateful to my dissertation committee for their knowledge and support.
Leslie Morris and Cindy Garcia provided invaluable advice during the defense and I
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look forward to incorporating their comments as I expand this manuscript into a book-
length study. I am grateful to Sonja Arsham Kuftinec for all her feedback, as well as
for asking a key question at a critical point in my writing. My heartfelt thanks to Gary
Cohen for a thorough grounding in the history of Central Europe, for reading extremely
rough drafts, and for providing valuable insight on the historical context of the
testimony. Finally I would like to thank my advisor, Margaret Werry, for reading even
more and even rougher drafts, for pushing me to read more deeply into the testimony,
for guiding me back to the emotional core of the project, and for telling me, at an early
but fraught point in the process, "We'll get you through."
At the University of Minnesota I would also like to thank all the staff of the
Department of Theatre Arts and Dance, everyone in the Center for Austrian Studies,
and professor emeritus Josef Mestenhauser for his academic and consular support. I am
grateful to Professor Jindřich Toman at the University of Michigan for uttering a
particular sentence at a critical juncture. At the University of Texas, Suzan Zeder
constantly challenged me to question my own relationship to this material, and Stacy
Wolf shepherded my thesis play about the ghetto through the final phases of
development onto the stage. At the University of Wisconsin I extend my thanks to
Professor Donald Woolston for his unflagging support over many, many years, and
finally, I am glad to be able to express my gratitude to Standish Henning, professor
emeritus, for everything I have learned from him about writing, about academia, about
being an educator, and about being a friend.
Finally, to all my friends in Europe and the US who have listened to me talk and
talk and talk about this project, and to all my fellow graduate students and researchers
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who have struggled along with me as we have pursued our various scholarly missions:
I am honored to be your friend and colleague and I could not have done it without you.
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Dedication

This dissertation is dedicated to my family.
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Abstract

During all periods in postwar Czechoslovakia when the World War II Jewish ghetto at
Terezín (in German, Theresienstadt) could be discussed in the public sphere, Czech-
Jewish Holocaust survivors created and circulated narratives about the cultural life of
the ghetto and their own experience of agency and pleasure while engaged in theatrical
performances. Focusing on two periods, the immediate postwar years (1945-47) and an
early point in the political thaw leading to the Prague Spring (1963), I examine
testimony that survivors addressed to their fellow Czechs in the public sphere as a
rhetorical performance in its own right. The constative and the performative aspects of
testimony have shifted over time; in each period, survivors needed or wanted their
testimony to achieve different effects, and they provided different information about
theatrical performance in the ghetto.
The survivors clearly adjusted their narratives in response to period-specific pressures
as they tried to reinforce both their subjectivity and their subject position in postwar
Czechoslovakia. Nevertheless, the testimony of both periods shares a consistent core of
themes, suggesting that theatrical performance in the ghetto functioned as a social
practice that increased the prisoners' resilience and ability to cope with the traumatic
events occurring in the ghetto on a day-to-day basis. Their postwar testimony reveals a
related function: they resisted objectification within the sometimes hostile environment
of postwar Czechoslovakia by establishing and conveying the meaning they ascribed to
their own experience, thus remaining speaking subjects.