A Chilling journey into the Dark Heart of the Holocaust

 

Reviewed by Jackie Minniti

 

   There is nothing that brings history to life more vividly than seeing it through the eyes of someone who was there.  Janka, a play by award-winning TV director and writer Oscar Speace, is a perfect example. Inspired by a 60-page letter written by the playwright’s late mother, this one-woman drama takes the audience on a chilling journey into the dark heart of the Holocaust in the actual words of a survivor who went through hell and lived to tell the tale.

 

   Janka Festinger’s life fell apart in March of 1944 when the German army occupied the town of Sighet, Romania where she lived with her father, two brothers and two sisters. What follows is hard to hear and even harder to believe, but the audience is eased into the narrative by a 70-year-old Janka,  who tells her story with the cozy intimacy of an old friend sitting across a kitchen table. She invites you into her world by enlisting your help in making a decision – should she share her life story with her son?  From that point on, you become emotionally invested in her experiences, both happy and horrific.

 

   Using minimalist props (a small table, a bottle of water, some family photos), Janka weaves together her “four lives”-her life before Hitler, because of Hitler, as a wife and as a widow - into a seamless saga that slides effortlessly back and forth in time. While she is recalling a pleasant experience, something will trigger a haunting memory and she is sucked back into the vortex of the Holocaust. Conversely, when one of those stories becomes almost too awful to bear, a reminder of a happier moment will cause her to flash forward. This temporal shift, rather than being disruptive, provides an emotional “time-out” that never allows the audience to become desensitized.

 

   Throughout the play, Janka directly addresses the audience, pulling them into her world in a very personal way. The unspeakable horrors of the concentration camps – bitter cold, blistering heat, unrelenting thirst, hunger, sickness, hopelessness and death - as well as the joys of liberation, marriage, and motherhood all hit the audience with a visceral intensity. When Janka appreciatively caresses her bottle of water, everyone in the theater can empathize. You stand with her, barefoot and terrified, in the frozen prison yard at Auschwitz. You feel her agony when she is unable to grant her beloved sister’s dying request for a spoonful of milk. When she is finally freed from the death camp, you rejoice with her. When she reads her husband’s love letters, you sense their mutual devotion. You share her disappointment when three pregnancies end in miscarriages. When she sings the Yiddish lullaby that soothed her infant sons, you are warmed by the affection in her voice. When she describes her boys chasing fireflies on a warm summer night, you can’t help but smile. And when she weeps for her lost loved ones, you experience the depth of her pain. The family photographs in the background create a virtual photo album that makes the play’s unseen characters come to life, while the Klezmer musical accompaniment manages to reflect the mood of the narrative, be it upbeat or melancholy.

 

   At the end of the play, Janka makes the decision about what to tell her son. She comes to her conclusion after a grueling odyssey of self-realization that is testimony to her love of life and her will to survive. While audience members may or may not agree with her decision, each one will leave the theater with a renewed appreciation for the resiliency of the human spirit, and the commitment that Janka’s story, along with the stories of six million of her fellow Jews, must never be forgotten.

 

    - Jackie Minniti, columnist for The Island Reporter

Award-winning author of Project June Bug