Kindertransport (NHB Modern Plays)

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Rubin (Scarecrow Press, 1999), a compilation of eight plays, including Kindertransport, along with related activities and resources for upper elementary, middle and high school students. Since it was first staged by the Soho Theatre Company in London in 1993, Diane Samuels’ Kindertransport has enjoyed huge success around the world, has been revived numerous times, and is widely studied in schools and colleges. At the same time in the present, Evelyn's daughter Faith is uncovering her mother's secret past and they have an argument, which eventually comes to rest.

Set Text: Kindertransport is a set text for GCSE English Literature (AQA) and AS/A-Level English Literature (WJEC). Teresa Eyring Executive Director Theatre Communications Group (TCG) AHO Conference, Miami, FL TCG is a national organization for theatre, based in New York. Spared the horrors of the death camps, the Jewish "Kinder" were uprooted, separated from their parents and transported to a different culture where they faced, not the unmitigated horror of the death camps, but a very human mixture of kindness, indifference, occasional exploitation, and the selflessness of ordinary people faced with needy children. Kindertransport was first performed in the UK by the Soho Theatre Company at the Cockpit Theatre, Marylebone, in London on 13 April 1993 and in the US at the Manhattan Theatre Club in New York on 26 April 1994. This play is also available as an A4 Edition, offering spiral binding, a larger print size and additional space for notes.This includes Remembrance Readings of plays from the Holocaust Theater Catalog done by numerous organizations led by Theaters, Museums, Universities, Artists and Educators. It's a refreshing change for a study guide to come from the pen of the person who created the text being studied. The play enjoyed a season in London's West End, playing at the Vaudeville Theatre from 9 September to 30 November 1996. Subsequently the play has been produced in San Francisco with awards, Sweden, Japan, Germany, Austria, Canada and South Africa. Helga and Werner Schlesinger are parents faced with the difficult choice of keeping their beloved daughter Eva in Germany with them, or letting her become one of the Kindertransport children, who are sent to the UK, alone.

Kindertransport depicts the agony of separating a child from her parents and wrestles with the consequences of that choice, an act of sacrifice that also wreaks devastating results. The play tells the story of how nine-year-old Eva, a German Jewish girl, is sent by her parents on the Kindertransport to start a new life with a foster family in Britain just before the outbreak of World War Two. Eva and Lil fall out as Eva skips her English lessons to go and ask round rich houses if they will give her parents jobs; Lil thinks this makes her seem desperate. And she presents detailed accounts from the actors, directors, a composer and designer who have contributed to the play’s most notable productions.In this author’s guide to the play, Diane Samuels investigates the historical background, drawing on the personal testimony of those whose lives were transformed by the Kindertransport. All of this takes place in the attic of Evelyn's house, which supposedly represents Evelyn's psyche. Eva’s imagination transforms the official (and most other authority figures) into the Ratcatcher, a mythical villain from a children’s book Helga used to read to Eva. Brutally separated from her German Jewish parents at the age of nine, Eva is brought to England with the promise of a new life. The play also focuses on the now assimilated and completely dislocated Eva’s alienation from her actual mother, a survivor of the Holocaust, and the discovery by Faith, Eva’s daughter, of her mother’s unspoken past.

The play jumps back and forth between three time periods: 1) Pre-war - in which Helga tries to prepare Eva to leave her home and parents; 2) War - in which Eva is living in England with Lil, adjusting to a new country, and desperately trying to get her parents out of Germany; and 3) Post-war, in which Eva (who has now changed her name to Evelyn) is an adult, has a daughter named Faith, and has intentionally wiped most of her past and her Jewishness out of existence. When her own daughter discovers some old letters and photos in the attic, she is forced to confront the truth about who she really is and to reveal a dark secret that she has done everything to keep hidden. Eva Schlesinger, daughter of Helga and Werner, is sent away to live with a foster carer in Manchester, England, temporarily until her parents find work and move to England too.When Eva arrives in London, speaking no English, and feeling very much abandoned, she is taken under the wing of Lil Miller. Through flashbacks, the play presents the hardships faced by Eva, a nine-year-old child sent on a Kindertransport and taken in by a British family. When Evelyn was nine, her mother Helga sent her to live in England to keep her safe from Nazi persecution.

This edition includes several personal memoirs by German-born children whose lives were saved, and transformed, by the Kindertransport. Eva and Lil both eventually become at peace with one another and get on well; Eva is shown as gradually losing her Jewish roots. In 1939, at the start of the play’s earlier timeline, Helga sends her young daughter Eva to live in England.Between 1939 until the outbreak of World War II, nearly 10,000 Jewish children were taken from their families in Nazi-occupied Germany and sent to live with foster families in Britain.