But I Smile Anyway…

Thank you Linda for your Stream of Concentration prompt.

Your Friday prompt for Stream of Consciousness Saturday is: “concentration.” Use it any way you see fit. Have fun!

When I read the prompt, the first thing that came to mind was concentration camps.

As a university student, one of my degree subjects, alongside English, was Drama, and we had several performances that we acted in throughout the 4 years of our degree.

One which was the most poignant, and heart wrenching was a performance of Ghetto by Joshua Sobol. This was a play about a theatre group in  the Vilna Ghetto, and the play included important figures from WW2, such as Jacob Gens, who was head of the Jewish police, and later head of the Ghetto.

I played one of the actors, and my most memorable scene was when we were forced to perform Swanee, by the Nazis, and as we sang, they slapped black paint across our faces.It made me feel humiliated, even though it was not real. What those people went through…

At our last performance, we had a special guest come to watch. He was an elderly Jewish gentleman. Someone who had lived in the ghettos and in a concentration camp, and lived to tell the tale. As he watched, he cried. Our performance had moved him to tears, awakening awful memories, and feelings within him. He was not upset at us for inviting him to the show, but touched that we felt it important to perform a play with such a tough subject.

The whole experience, the character building information gathering, the actual becoming the character I was, touched me. I thank God that I was not one to have lived in that time, to be subjected to the cruelties and racism that the Jewish community had to suffer.

The atrocities of the time are well documented, and we can all read about them, but to actually put yourself in their shoes, even for a performance… harrowing…