LEST ANYONE FORGET..
Storytime! Before a tangled treescape Samantha Spiro sits with a book on her lap. Across the simple stage a few notes from Gemma Rosefield’s ‘cello settle us to listen. Like all stories for the youngest it begins with a poor woodcutter’s wife in the forest, gathering twigs. But it’s 1943, somewhere in Central Europe, and her husband works under orders from an occupying power. She has a romantic dream about the trains with slatted sides which run daily along the new iron roadway: thundering creatures, godlike. She gazes, hears they are “goods trains”, reflects what wonderful things “goods” might be: imagined riches.
Far away another story unfolds: a French couple with newborn twins, hustled from home by gendarmes, fear the worst, are entrained. The wife can barely feed one infant with prison-shrunken breasts; desperately, in hope or despair, the father wraps the other in his prayer-shawl and eases it through the bars to fling it onto the snow. The woodcutter’s wife has always wanted a child and now, suddenly, picks up the most precious, most vulnerable of goods. She struggles to save the baby, feed it and reconcile her angry husband who has been told that the trains hold ‘a cursed race, people without hearts”
The novella by Jean-Claude Grumberg, translated and directed by Nicholas Kent, is a blend of stark Holocaust history and fairytale: oddly, I remember such fables from my postwar early-childhood in France, books for the young which acknowledged the camps and killings but yearned towards an imaginative humanity in victims: one ends with a young girl entering the gas chamber after a long ordeal of trains and starvation, to step into warm light and joy. Here, talking of the mother and twin baby at the end of their train journey, Grumberg simply says they were “liberated from the cares of this world to the gates of Paradise, as promised to the innocents”.
But the darkness is all there, unsparing. There is fear in the story of the imprisoned father forced to shave the heads of the doomed in camp; fear of the war-scarred, ugly angry firest hermit with whom the mother pleads for goat’s milk; terror in the woodcutter’s resentment of the child from the ‘cursed heartless people”. When the baby reaches a small hand out to him he relents, and there is heroic terror in his brave refusal to drink to the death of Jews amd om the inevitable arrival of militia trying to take the baby, defended by his axe.
Spiro – who took over the role late because of illness – moves easily around, sometimes cradling the prayer shawl. She is a masterly storyteller, whether in gentle simplicity, cutting irony or raucously evoking an gang of oafish men drunk on wood-alcohol. Rosefield’s ‘cello gives ominous or peaceful notes, a train’s accelerating, a scream of witches, a Brahms lullaby, a Yiddish lament. It is hypnotic and beautifully pitched, the terrible lists of names alongside and the projections behind (woodland, rails, faces of the prisoners) adding but unobtrusive.
The story winds on, threatening a fairytale concusion then fading to the possible; it laments the long wanderings of the displaced thousands after the Red Army and peace bring an end to the war . Lost people, “crowding from all the conquered capitals of the Continent”. In an ironic kick at the end the narrator shrugs “it’s a story, just a story, there were no camps, no trains, no chambers…”
I am glad to have happened to see it at a schools’ matinee, last preview: around me kids held in thrall, brought here as we approach Holocaust Memorial Day. There is giggling once or twice early on at the word “breasts” , but ever more silent, engrossed attention to Grumberg’s word-pictures of growing babyhood, sharpened axes, shorn hair sent to the conquerors as wigs “or mops”.
I think they got it, all right. I hope it reaches many more, and their elder siblings who might be tempted to shout “river to the sea” without thinking.
Box office. marylebonetheatre.com. to. 3 Feb
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