A Tale of Survival

 

One-Woman Play Tells the Horrors of the Holocaust

By Donald Munro, The Fresno Bee

 

(Fresno, CA) July 17, 2006 – Like most wives dealing with their mothers-in-law, Janice Noga and Janka Speace didn't always see eye to eye.

 

Now, on stage, Noga tries to see through those eyes.

 

In "Janka," a one-woman play written by Noga's husband, Oscar Speace, the local actress tackles a role that is tougher and more personal than any in her career. Noga's mother-in-law was an Auschwitz prisoner, one of only three members of an extended family of 66 who survived the Nazi death camps. Liberated in 1945 and married to an American soldier, Robert Speace, the next year, Janka started a new life in the United States.

 

Hers is a survivor's story told through her own words – her letters — and those of her son. The fact that her daughter-in-law portrays her adds an even more personal touch. Janka's Hungarian accent, her impressive posture, the way she brings her hand up to her mouth when speaking of great sadness – these aren't just historical details. They're memories distilled through someone who was an integral part of her life.

Janka died in 1994.

 

"As an actress, I've taken everything I remembered about her," Noga says. "The hardest performance I ever did was at the University of Connecticut with family members in the audience — with Janka's other son, David, two nephews and a cousin who was close to her who had never seen the show. They were stunned. They felt that they really saw Janka up there."

 

"Janka" has played in the Valley several times, including North Fork and the Fresno Art Museum. The show toured college campuses across the country. And it had a three-week run at a small theater in Hollywood.

 

As director, Oscar Speace, a documentary filmmaker who produces "Valley Press" at KVPT, Channel 18, has been cutting and shaping the show in response to audiences.

Now the project is taking its next big step: a 12-performance run starting Aug. 14 at the famed International Festival Fringe in Edinburgh, Scotland. As a fundraiser, and to give the play one more workout before facing the rough-and-tumble world of the Edinburgh festival's audiences and critics, it opens for four performances Tuesday, Wednesday and July 25-26 at the 2nd Space Theatre.

 

For Noga, who performs the two-hour show flanked by old photographs of Janka and other family members, it's a complicated experience. She plays a woman who in some ways kept Noga at arm's length when she married her son. Noga isn't Jewish, and even though Janka herself married outside her faith – her husband, who died in 1984, was Episcopalian – it still made Noga something of an outsider.

 

Yet there was a bond between the two women that Noga didn't fully understand until she started performing in "Janka" more than 10 years after her mother-in-law's death. They shared an important link: husband and son. For much of his life, Oscar Speace wondered about his mother's experience at Auschwitz — something she never wanted to talk about. If he pushed her, she would cry. Janka felt that if she didn't tell how awful it was, she would protect him.

 

Close to her husband's heart, the story Noga relives has become close to her as well.

"This is his baby," she says. "Because this is his mother."

 

Many Holocaust survivors were reticent about their memories. Their children often mention today the difficulty in talking to their parents about such horrific times.

"My mother didn't want to talk about it," Speace says.

 

Born and raised in the Romanian city of Sighet, the setting for Eli Wiesel's "Night," Janka's story was all too common: Her family was warned of the impending danger. But they chose to disregard it. Janka's father was a well-to-do Jewish businessman. It was a comfortable life. To flee would have been an upheaval.

 

Even when the grim truth of the Nazi "final solution" began to sink in, it was hard for them to grasp the depth of such evil, Noga says.

 

"They didn't ever believe that the Nazis would come to Sighet. They honestly felt that God wouldn't let that happen to them."

 

Janka was separated from most of her family members when she arrived at the camp. She was able to remain only with her younger sister.

 

After the war, Janka got a job working in a Red Cross canteen in Germany. She asked homeward-bound Americans to contact her only living relative, an uncle named Morris Festinger, who had emigrated to Cleveland before the war.

 

One of those soldiers did contact her uncle, and Janka reconnected with him. While still in Germany, her uncle asked her to write down what had happened to her family. She did so in a 60-page composition book, which was the inspiration for "Janka."

 

Speace and Noga didn't get to read that book while Janka was alive. But two years after her death, in 1996, it surfaced. The letter was written in Hungarian. Speace found a neighbor, Nora DeWitt, who could translate in her spare time. For nine months, he went over to her house each Saturday morning, drank tea and listened to her translate a few pages while he transcribed on his laptop computer. In this manner, Janka's frank and poignant account unfolded: the wretched days spent without food and water on the train on the way to camp, the bleak arrival in total darkness at Auschwitz, the children wrenched from their mothers' arms.

"Of course, Nora would start to cry before I started to cry," he says.

Then, he'd go home, have lunch with his wife and relate the latest translation. And then she'd cry, too.

 

It was an emotional nine months.

 

At the beginning of "Janka," the title character is saying goodbye to her son, who has come to New Jersey for his 25th high school reunion. As always, he has asked her about the Holocaust. She vents to the audience.

 

"After all these years, I can barely speak of it." Janka says. "Why does he want to know? I don't understand. I'm an old woman. Can't you see that? Can't he see that?"

Noga always has been a big and boisterous presence on the stage. ("It's the Portuguese in me," she says.) She appeared on Broadway in "Zorba," "Fiddler on the Roof" and "Annie." She played Mama Rose in "Gypsy" in the Good Company Players production at Roger Rocka's Dinner Theater. A powerful singer, she's given concerts in New York, Los Angeles and London. On stage, she's always considered herself strongest in the musical-comedy genre.

 

She portrays Janka from ages 20 to 70. "Janka" is a story of adversity, yes, but it's also a story of the resilience of the human spirit. With most of her family wiped out, Janka started a new life in a new country, with all the loneliness and potential that implies. While her account of life in Auschwitz forms the spine of the play, we see more of her life than just tragedy.

 

In many ways, her mother-in-law was a mystery to her — someone who valued family above all else but was always a little reluctant to fully accept Noga as a member of that family.

 

After all, Noga told her mother-in-law quite clearly that converting from Roman Catholicism to Judaism was not a negotiable issue.

Yet there were times, Noga says, when they intensely bonded.

One of the great tragedies of Noga's life was when she lost her twin sister, Joyce, to cancer. Janka was sympathetic — above and beyond what you'd expect from a mother-in-law. She knew about losing family. She had watched her beloved elder sister, Gizi, die in the camps.

 

"I know what it was like to be there with my sister, when she was bloated and dying, and to know what it was like to lose someone close to you," Noga says. "When Janka called to talk to me, she spoke of how beautiful my twin sister was, how gracious she was to her. She told me that she knew the pain I was feeling. I think in a way she was reliving the loss of Gizi."

 

In 1994, the year her mother-in-law died, Noga nearly lost her voice because of brain surgery. To speed her recovery, she took advanced Shakespeare classes at California State University, Fresno, to provide a discipline to help memorize lines.

So in the end, you have two women — linked not just through marriage but through that wonderful and keen human trait of survival. Janka overcame unspeakable adversity. Noga did, too, when it comes to performing. Together, they're both survivors.