Ignoring the horrors around her, an Auschwitz prisoner tried to keep her fellow inmates spirits alive by weaving magical stories filled with Jewish tradition and hope.
When a guard caught her he cracked her across the skull with his rifle and scornfully asked, “Who’s going to remember your stories when you are all dead?”
”You will,” she defiantly replied as blood trickled from her forehead.
That woman was Shonaleigh Cumbers’ grandmother and from the age of four she taught her granddaughter the ancient art of the Drut’sylas, Yiddish oral storytellers, so that the legacy would live on. Today Shonaleigh is thought to be the only one left in the world of these storytellers.
These stories need to carry on, and like her grandmother, so many of the survivors of the Nazi concentration camps have passed away.
But thanks to ground-breaking new theatre company, Voice of the Holocaust, Shonaleigh’s words and the vast and varied stories of the war are being brought to audiences as never before.
The Milton Keynes-based company has made waves since launching in January and is coming to Watford Pumphouse next week with two performances that aim to show the Holocaust was more complex than a black and white battle of Nazis versus Jews.
Artistic director Cate Hibbert says: ”It wasn’t that Hitler was evil, that’s the easy thing, that excuses us from responsibility. That’s saying bad things happen because of bad people and that’s not the story of the Holocaust.
”It could have been us in there shooting people. They were ordinary people who went home and put their children to bed, who had loving relationships and chose to do it.”
The former head of drama set up Voices after realising the subject was being ”mistaught” in schools and says: ”There’s so many teachers who see it as a way of getting students good grades and seeing pupils screaming to death in gas chambers to get an A is horrific.
”Our theatre is beautiful. We address the grotesque and horrifying in a way that doesn’t traumatise young people.
”Holocaust education needs to be creative and imaginative and do the work that survivors’ voices have been doing for decades.”
They will be performing Fragile Fires, the story of the Warsaw Ghetto resistance fighters who tried to stop the Nazis sending 400,000 inmates to their deaths in Treblinka.
The play is based on the uprising’s leader Mordechai Anielewicz and his girlfriend Cate says: ”They fought back knowing they would die, there was absolutely no doubt in their minds.
”They were so much in love and had this wonderful possible future, but prioritised taking a stand over that.”
Shonaleigh will tell the captivating story of The Fool and Cate says: ”She has added layers, beautiful layers of narrative development so the story grows and reflects not only in the ghetto and what happened in Auschwitz but also the voices of survivors.
“One of the key things with Voices, and the reason it’s an honour to be working with Shonaleigh, is that the Nazis tried to wipe out a culture and eradicate these people from the face of the earth ”What’s beautiful is that by working with Shonaleigh and these stories it stamps a mark that says they failed.”