A MOMENT FOR REMEMBERING
A desk, leather chairs, a heap of file boxes, a single sunflower in a pot. The century has turned, and it’s the last day in the office for Simon Wiesenthal, holocaust survivor and for half a century the most famous and redoubtable hunter of Nazi war -criminals. Christopher C Gibbs plays him, in Tom Dugan’s measured, thoughtful monologue 75-minute play, back after ten years and landing in this theatre at a horribly apposite moment.
The old man, well over 90, has things to tell us. But he keeps checking on the phone to confirm the whereabouts of one last target thought to be in the Meridian Hotel. His wife Cyla calls to remind him about bringing home the fish. She, we will learn as his autobiographical lecture goes on, has sometimes wanted him to give up the relentless pursuit and go and live in peace in Israel . But Wiesenthal has stayed on in Vienna, working, collecting, finding, and seeing dozens of officials and guards brought to justice.
It has not been everything he expected in his early days of trauma and relief. In a startling spotlit moment he re-lives one early capture, in which he played a small part: the trial of Eichmann, architect of the “Final Solution” . He expresses his personal shock and confusion. “A little bookkeeper..tiny…where was my monster? I wanted a monster!” Other trials fill the same awareness that monsters are humans no different from us, apart from their terrible choices. When he was rescued from his final camp, starving and close to death, the SS guards had seemed huge and powerful , almsot another species. Through the decades of finding and seeing war criminals, he learned the terrible truth that they could be almost any of us. “It does not need to be a criminal to commit mass murder. Just someone obeying authority….”.
And again later he reflects that every mass killer from Hitler to Bin Laden “is part of us. All we can do is contain him”. He acknowledges firmly those – notably two SS men – who did not obey terrible orders so readily: to him it is proof that the containment, personal and social, “is always a choice”. He also muses with some compassion on how it was to be German after the great defeat of WW1: ‘they were hungry and ashamed..Hitler lifted up the German people’s shame”. And as shamed people do, they found someone to blame. Jews.
The personal memories, drawn from Wiesenthal’s several memoirs, are inevitably stark, though enlivened by moments like the extraordinary discovery that Cyla had survived, and reflections on the birth of their grandchildren and great-grandchildren since. His message is the simplest: remember and acknowledge that this terrible thing happened , a dark moment when “barbarism met techology” to create industrial-scale murder, not only of six million jews but five million others, homosexuals ,gipsies , black and disabled people who did not fit the Nazi template.
He remembers the cemetery alongside Dachau, where every grave had a sunflower, and mourns the millions who will never have a graceful grave: his own office sunflower remains, under a single light, when he finally leaves the stage, because he is enjoining us all to remember, because he is old and has not much longer. And we have to remember, because it is the business of us all : not revenge, but remembering. Acknowledging where human choices have led, and could again. Immaculately done: go see it.
kingsheadtheatre.com to 15 Sept
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