Holocaust survivors and student actors connect through Ghetto

In Ghetto Israeli writer Joshua Sobol explores the true story of artists and performers living in the infamous Vilna Ghetto, who in the lead up to its ‘liquidation’ in September 1943, were forced by the Nazis to put on a play.

The authenticity of the faculty’s production was intensified by the fact that international guest director Harald Fuhrmann and student actors from the cast met with several survivors of the Holocaust now living in Melbourne, as part of their preparation.

One of these survivors, Avram Zeleznikow, escaped from the Vilna Ghetto to become a partisan. The Vilna Ghetto was an area in the Lithuanian town of Vilnius established in the early 1940s by the Nazis as a prison-home for the region’s 40,000 Jews. Apart from the very few who survived, the inhabitants of the Vilna Ghetto were sent to death and slave labour camps during the course of the Second World War.

Famous for introducing Jewish food to the Australian public through their iconic Acland Street restaurant Scheherezade, Avram and Masha Zeleznikow met with Harald Fuhrmann, visiting international director-in-residence at the School of Performing Arts, and members of VCAM’s Acting Company of 2010 cast in the challenging production.

Mr Fuhrmann says that although the subject of Ghetto is very dark and confronting, the acting students were able to expand and deepen their characters through meeting the survivors.

“Theatre is not private, but it must be personal,” he says. “The most important thing was to get the performers to connect to the role with their heads, and then more deeply with their hearts. Even though they could never really know what the Holocaust experience was like for these people, as actors the challenge for them was to try to feel the emotion that was experienced. Spending time with people who were directly involved has been invaluable.”

Cast as Hayyah, a former singer, actor Frankey Bianchi says all students involved with the production, from actors and musicians to set and costume designers, did a lot of research into the Holocaust in preparation, but sometimes the stories she read about were so horrific she didn’t want to believe they were real.

“After meeting the survivors however, there was no more room for denial and the whole world of the play suddenly became real. All of us, I think, after meeting the survivors were much more determined to confront the world of the play in order to perform it with as much truth as we possibly could.

“Being involved in a production like Ghetto reminded me and a lot of my company members why we wanted to be actors in the first place. It was an incredibly humbling experience.”

In various productions around the world Ghetto has attracted controversy because it depicts the range of responses of the Jewish people involved, from resistance, collaboration, profiteering and the seeming betrayal of the ghetto inhabitants by the Jewish Council leaders, appointed by the Nazis to control the people, and ultimately, to choose who was to be sent to death.

Critics have said the conflict among Jews living in the ghetto should not be shown, as it has the potential to deflect responsibility for the inhuman treatment by the Nazis to Jews.

But Mr Furhmann’s view is that the play’s depiction of the full breadth of human behaviour in the most difficult of circumstances is its very strength.