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Melbourne Holocaust survivors connect with their past and young VCAM artists
Several survivors of the Holocaust now living in Melbourne, have met with director Harald Fuhrmann and student actors currently cast in the play Ghetto by Israeli writer Joshua Sobol, to explore the legacy of the Holocaust, and the story of the infamous Vilna Ghetto.
Ghetto performance season: Thursday 27 May to Friday 4 June.
Cost: $20 Full / $15 Concession. Bookings: vcam-perfarts@unimelb.edu.au
Enquiries: Katherine Smith, University of Melbourne Media Unit (0402 460 147 / k.smith@unimelb.edu.au)
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. Besides 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, who is a 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.
Ghetto is the true story of artists and performers living in Vilna who, in the lead up to the ‘liquidation’ of the ghetto in September 1943, were forced to put on a play by the Nazis.
Mr Fuhrman says that although the subject of Ghetto is very dark and confronting, the acting students have been able to expand and deepen their characters through the meeting.
"Theatre is not private, but it must be personal," he says. "The most important thing is to get the performers to connect to the role with their heads, and then more deeply with their hearts. Even though they cannot really know what the Holocaust experience was like for these people, as actors the challenge is for them to try to feel the emotion that was experienced. Spending time with people who were directly involved is very important."
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 amongst 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 says the very strength of the play is that is depicts the full breadth of human behaviour in the most difficult of circumstances.
