In a tribute to Holocaust victims, a Czech theater troupe is roaming the rails of central Europe this summer aboard a train converted into a stage for a play about Jews sent to Nazi death camps.
“I thought about this idea for a long time — to stage a play on a train, a symbol of Jewish transports during World War II,” said Pavel Chalupa, director of the Nine Gates festival of Jewish culture and mastermind of the project.
“The Nazi regime transported Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps on board cattle wagons,” said Chalupa, who has teamed up with Prague’s Pod Palmovkou theater.
Photo: AFP
Traveling through the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, the symbolic “Train of No Return” will present a theatrical adaptation of A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova, a novel by Arnost Lustig (1926-2011), a Czech Jew who survived the Holocaust, also known as the Shoah.
The story takes place in 1943 on a train to the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The Nazis play a cynical game with a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen, promising them freedom in exchange for money, and a young Polish Jew, Katerina Horovitzova.
However, when she is asked to dance naked before a Nazi officer, she decides to take revenge for the humiliation.
Inspired by the true story of a Polish actress, Lustig wrote the novel in a single night in 1964.
“Women possess that little something that keeps poets alive,” he used to say.
“I am drawn to the Jewish theme ... I am very interested in the history of the Jews,” said Denisa Pfauserova, one of the two actresses who alternate playing Katerina, who with the businessmen in the end perishes at Auschwitz.
The theater-train of five wagons will start off next month with stops at 14 Czech railway stations before taking a highly symbolic tour of Wannsee, Prague, Krakow and Auschwitz in late August, Chalupa said.
In Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, leaders of the Third Reich gathered on Jan. 20, 1942, to agree what they termed “the final solution of the Jewish question,” or Nazi Germany’s plan of genocide against European Jews.
In the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Krakow, the Germans liquidated a Jewish ghetto on March 13, 1943.
And at the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, an estimated 1.1 million people, including about 1 million Jews from across Europe, were killed from 1940 to 1945 at Nazi Germany’s most infamous killing site.
An audience of about one hundred people will be able to watch the play on portable theater seats. The performance will take place on a stage measuring 8m by 4m inside one of the wagons, with subtitles for the Czech screened in Germany and Poland.
“A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova is a great story. I don’t understand why it has never appealed to a big US movie studio,” said Petr Kracik, director of the Prague-based Pod Palmovkou theater — though it was made into a Czech film.
The theater-train will depart next month from the now derelict Prague-Bubny station, where during World War II Czech Jews boarded trains first to a ghetto in the northern town of Terezin and then to death camps.
The train includes two authentic cattle wagons used in the Nazi transports which will house a cinema hall and an exhibition on the events from 70 years ago. These include the Wannsee conference, the killing of one participant Reinhard Heydrich in Prague in 1942, and the story of Swedish diplomat Raoul Wallenberg who saved up to 100,000 Jews during the war.
Joining the actors and stage crew on board will be students from Berlin, Prague and Krakow on the journey between Wannsee and Auschwitz.
“Like the Jewish girl Anne Frank during the war, they will keep diaries to capture the atmosphere of the performances and discussions with the actors and spectators,” Chalupa said.
“We expect to publish the diaries. We want the young to become familiar with this topic. It’s important, especially with the current rise of neo-Nazism and racism,” he added.
Nearly half of China’s major cities are suffering “moderate to severe” levels of subsidence, putting millions of people at risk of flooding, especially as sea levels rise, according to a study of nationwide satellite data released yesterday. The authors of the paper, published by the journal Science, found that 45 percent of China’s urban land was sinking faster than 3mm per year, with 16 percent at more than 10mm per year, driven not only by declining water tables, but also the sheer weight of the built environment. With China’s urban population already in excess of 900 million people, “even a small portion
‘IN A DIFFERENT PLACE’: The envoy first visited Shanghai, where he attended a Chinese basketball playoff match, and is to meet top officials in Beijing tomorrow US Secretary of State Antony Blinken yesterday arrived in China on his second visit in a year as the US ramps up pressure on its rival over its support for Russia while also seeking to manage tensions with Beijing. The US diplomat tomorrow is to meet China’s top brass in Beijing, where he is also expected to plead for restraint as Taiwan inaugurates president-elect William Lai (賴清德), and to raise US concerns on Chinese trade practices. However, Blinken is also seeking to stabilize ties, with tensions between the world’s two largest economies easing since his previous visit in June last year. At the
UNSETTLING IMAGES: The scene took place in front of TV crews covering the Trump trial, with a CNN anchor calling it an ‘emotional and unbelievably disturbing moment’ A man who doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire outside the courthouse where former US president Donald Trump is on trial has died, police said yesterday. The New York City Police Department (NYPD) said the man was declared dead by staff at an area hospital. The man was in Collect Pond Park at about 1:30pm on Friday when he took out pamphlets espousing conspiracy theories, tossed them around, then doused himself in an accelerant and set himself on fire, officials and witnesses said. A large number of police officers were nearby when it happened. Some officers and bystanders rushed
Beijing is continuing to commit genocide and crimes against humanity against Uyghurs and other Muslim minorities in its western Xinjiang province, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a report published on Monday, ahead of his planned visit to China this week. The State Department’s annual human rights report, which documents abuses recorded all over the world during the previous calendar year, repeated language from previous years on the treatment of Muslims in Xinjiang, but the publication raises the issue ahead of delicate talks, including on the war in Ukraine and global trade, between the top U.S. diplomat and Chinese