Lisa Traiger has been writing about theater and dance since 1985. Currently she contributes a weekly dance column to The Washington Post Weekend section. Her pieces on the cultural and performing arts appear regularly in the Washington Jewish Week and DanceViewTimes.com. She has also written for Moment magazine, Stagebill, Sondheim Review, Asian Week, the Boston Jewish Advocate, the Atlanta Jewish Times, Intermission and the Washington Review. A recipient of two Simon Rockower Awards for Excellence in Arts Criticism from the American Jewish Press Association, she recently earned an M.F.A. in choreography from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2003, Ms. Traiger was a New York Times Fellow in the Institute for Dance Criticism at the American Dance Festival, Durham, N.C. e-mail: lisatraiger@aol.com
The last time Esther Rosenfeld Starobin saw her parents she was 27 months old. It was June 1939.
Today she has no memory of boarding a train and then a boat and traveling with a group of Jewish children to Norwich, England. Her parents soon perished, among the six million trapped in Hitler's killing machine that he innocuously named the Final Solution.
But Starobin, her three sisters and a brother survived because her parents made the greatest sacrifice: giving them up and sending them away to safety, into the arms of strangers.
Sunday afternoon, Starobin, a Silver Spring resident, sat with her sister Bertl Esenstad watching Kindertransport, Diane Samuels' poignant and heartfelt play about one child who was sent to safety in England and the ramifications that family separation have had on this woman as an adult.
The Rosenfeld sisters were real-life children on the kindertransports when, between November 1938 and September 1939, some 10,000 mostly Jewish children were rescued from Nazi-occupied Europe. But nearly all of them left behind their parents and other family members.
Some left behind their Jewish legacy as well, for many of these Jewish children were taken in by British families who were often fundamentalist Christians or Quakers. Esenstad, who left her tiny village in southern Germany months earlier than her baby sister, pointed out that their experience as kinder -- children -- on the transports out of Nazi Germany was completely different from the fact-based story penned by Samuels.
The Sandy Spring Theatre Group, a 55-year-old active community theater company, brings Kindertransport to the Gaithersburg Arts Barn where it will be performed through Oct. 30.
The production examines the ramifications of a life lived keeping secrets. We first meet 9-year-old Eva (Sarah Lasko) and her doting mother, Helga (Nicolette Stearns).
"You have to be able to manage on your own," says a worried Helga to her daughter, and soon enough the past in 1938 Hamburg, Germany, and the present in mid-1970s England intertwine.
Director Patricia Woolsey does a valiant job intermingling the split lives of Eva who becomes Evelyn in England with little more than basic lighting cues and a few minor costume switches.
Much of the play takes place fittingly in the attic of adult Evelyn's London home, where her ghosts seem likely inhabitants.
Samuels' play makes a case for a multiplicity of past experiences informing present lives and as the characters shift backward and forward in time Evelyn's life -- if not her life choices -- come ever more sharply into focus.
As a grown woman, ever-so-British and emotionally sterile, Evelyn (Malinda Smith) has distanced herself from her college-aged daughter Faith (Emily Henochowicz) who has no idea of her mother's past as a child refugee. Her adoptive mother, Lil (Linda Gordon), too, excels at a very British style of unemotional parenting.
While some of Samuels' dialogue feels stilted, especially when the actors struggle with German and British accents, as the second act builds to its climactic moment, the deeply buried scars of adult Evelyn's past -- as what she felt as an abandoned child taken in by a caring but standoffish foster mother -- collide with her own daughter's present-day insecurities.
Samuels' story is at root a mother-daughter tale, dressed in the undeniably affecting remnants of Holocaust survivor psychology. It works the way many Holocaust plays and memoirs do, by taking its audience into the deeply disturbing lives of families torn asunder, their deprivation and the indescribable inhumanity they experienced. As drama, it becomes wrenching, as art, it becomes, unfortunately at times, overplayed and some audiences can feel taken advantage.
While the Sandy Spring team of actors, directors and designers strive valiantly to make sense of incomprehensible life experiences, the problem remains with Samuels' play, which had its world premiere in London in 1993 before coming to New York the following year. (It was seen in Alexandria at Horizons Theatre in 1995).
For Samuels hasn't made clear why Evelyn must bury her Jewish German life. This raises questions, in particular, for current American audiences because Holocaust experiences -- memoirs, films and fact-based fiction -- have gained much currency in general and Jewish markets.
The biggest unanswered question of Kindertransport then remains: Why the silence for so many years? It's the question, too, that resonated most forcefully for the Rosenfeld sisters, both now mothers and grandmothers.
"This not talking about it," mused Starobin after a viewing, "is the essence of the play. And I don't know why, but we never talked about it either."
Esenstad, also of Silver Spring, concurs, "It wasn't that we were ashamed É our lives were changed completely, but so were those of our foster families."
Although she was 13 when she left on a kindertransport in March of 1939, Esenstad has no recollection of the trip. She sums up feelings many child survivors have come to articulate about their pre-Holocaust lives, "I wasn't going to let Hitler claim my happy childhood."
Kindertransport is onstage at the Gaithersburg Arts Barn Oct. 15, 16, 22, 23, 29 and 30 at 8 p.m.; on Oct. 17 and 24 at 3 p.m. Tickets, $10-$12, are available by calling 301-258-6394.
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