By Janis Siegel , JTNews Correspondent
The Nazi officer turns to grab another body, throwing as many as he can, as quickly as he can, overboard into the Baltic Sea. The small, ragged woman, now completely alone in the world, does not put up a fight when his hands land on her. About to meet her death, she is not afraid.
The young woman who spoke impeccable German had cheated death in the camps many times before, but the last-minute Nazi strategy to drown all of the remaining Jews from the Stutthof Concentration Camp in Poland was underway.
“Do what ever you want to, I don’t care,” she tells her would-be executioner in a language he will understand.
In an unexplainable twist of fate, the perfect German so amuses and surprises the officer that he moves on and lets her be.
The woman’s daughter, award-winning Australian poet and author Lily Brett, was born in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany in 1946 and grew up watching her mother grapple with the mental and emotional fallout of her death-camp experiences.
“My father was shot and wounded and ended up at the bottom of a pile of bodies and survived,” said June Prager, another child of a survivor, re-telling her own painful story, remarkably similar to Brett’s.
Prager was born in Lodz, Poland and lived with her family in a Displaced Persons camp in Germany until 1949, when they were finally able to make their way to America. Both women had mothers who narrowly escaped death through a poised and innocent use of their impeccable language skills. Both Jewish women had mothers who found their Jewish husbands months later against seemingly insurmountable odds, and both women made New York their home.
Prager’s father made his way to Russia and survived by serving as a medic in the Russian army. Her mother escaped the Lodz Ghetto by speaking near-perfect Polish and getting past the ghetto guards.
Prager, an accomplished Seattle-based theatre director and producer, has adapted Brett’s poetry in her new play Museum Pieces, scheduled to open on Sept. 6 at the Seattle Public Theatre.
Museum Pieces focuses on the mother-daughter relationship, following the daughter both back in time and into the future as she tries superimposing her own wistful wishes of how it might have been.
“It’s not psychological therapy,” said Prager, a former New York City School teacher who, decades ago, quit the classroom for the life of an off-Broadway director. “It’s about loss and finding one’s identity when you’re a displaced person.”
The play is set in Australia, where Brett moved with her family in 1948. The daughter, played as a youth by Karen Heaven and as an adult by Molly Lyons, travels to Poland to revisit the events that caused her mother so much pain in an attempt to understand her distant and painfully private survivor mother.
“When I read her work, it helped me to connect again with my relationship and my sister’s relationship with my mother,” said Prager. “It is like a slight catharsis, a slight closure.”
The Australian author’s no-holds-barred poetry resurrects the horrific scenes and images that she has inherited as her family’s legacy. Brett says her poetry gives “a voice to the voiceless.”
In Museum Pieces, the excruciatingly accurate attention to the gruesome facts in Brett’s poems allows Prager a context for the typically silent relationship so many survivor parents seem to have with their children.
Brett’s first book, The Auschwitz Poems (1986), won the 1987 Victorian Premier’s Award for poetry. Her two other poetic works, Poland and Other Poems (1987) and After the War: Poems (1990) have also won critical acclaim.
Through gentle prodding from her husband, Brett’s initial career as a rock journalist gave way to this deeper calling to confront her own family’s history.
Brett herself understands the reluctance that some might have to delve deeply into the life of a child survivor. In an interview with the Australian Broadcasting Corporation Radio, she is somewhat confounded at the popularity of her work and how a general audience identifies with the somber material.
“I think it’s because people recognize themselves in the people that I write about,” said Brett. “In Germany, I’ve had people tell me that Edek in “Too Many Men” is their father or their grandfather. And I’ve had many, many young woman say they identify with the women in my books. I’ve actually had one major bookseller who suggested to me that if I could just skip the Holocaust theme, I could do incredibly well.”
Prager recently staged a reading of Museum Pieces for the Northwest Actors Studio Directors Showcase in Seattle.
“The poetry of Lily Brett is very prose-like and easily adapts to this dramatic narrative,” said Prager. “It goes back and forth, from the present to the past. The mother-daughter relationship is complex because it deals with the question of what it means to be a Holocaust survivor.”
The former student at Lee Strasberg’s Actor’s Studio in New York also directed Avalon for the Mae West Theatre Festival and Cedars, her adaptation of Native American poetry, presented at the Richard Hugo House, both in Seattle.
She has high hopes for this production.
“The dream would be that Seattle Public Theatre or one of the other theatres in town would give us a full run,” said Prager. “I would like to reach out and tour organizations, synagogues, museums, university theatres and theatres in Europe as well.”