Stage Review : Courage and Beauty Emerge From Cruelty of Holocaust

From 1942 to 1944, about 15,000 Jewish children passed through Terezin, a Nazi concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. It was set up as a way station or “model” camp to be shown to the Red Cross and visiting dignitaries before the children were sent on to the gas chambers of Auschwitz.

Forcibly separated from their parents, they spent as much as 2 years in the barracks at Terezin--euphemistically termed “children’s homes.” There they subsisted on a prison diet and received schooling clandestinely from the camp’s few adults, who encouraged them to write and to draw. Then, one by one, their Nazi captors chose them for deportation and execution.

None of the children were more than 15 years old. Only 100 survived. One was Raja Englanderova, a teen-age girl who is the central figure in Celeste Raspanti’s stage adaptation of “I Never Saw Another Butterfly.” The play is based on writings by the children of Terezin, which have been preserved in a permanent exhibition in Prague and as a book with the same title.

Presented over the weekend at the Moulton Theatre in Laguna Beach by the Laguna Playhouse Youth Theatre, “Butterfly” was an act of remembrance. While not exactly religious, its performance seemed nonetheless sacred. “The heaviest wheel rolls across our foreheads to bury itself deep within our memories,” a chorus intoned. It might have been a ritual elegy.

Themes of loss and despair naturally dominate the play, which takes place in Raja’s memory in 1946 and is set on a stark gray stage occasionally enhanced by dramatic lighting and photographic projections of the actual children of the camp. “Goodby--it was the motto of Terezin,” Raja says bitterly. “It should have been written above the gate instead of ‘Work Makes Us Free.’ ”

Yet Raja (Jennifer Triebwasser) is not without hope. “I learned the word courage ,” she recounts, “and found the determination to live, to believe in life.” It is not entirely persuasive when she says this in the first act, if only because she has been so traumatized that simply to repeat her name to herself “was an achievement.”

But by the second act we believe her when she says in a triumphant curtain speech: “My name is Raja. I am a Jew. I survived Terezin, not alone and not afraid.” Indeed, her transformation from despairing victim to defiant survivor carries symbolic meaning for all victims of the Holocaust as well as the rest of us.

Perhaps the most affecting scene occurs after Raja’s best friend has received her deportation number and is packed off by train with other doomed camp prisoners. “Where did Renka go?” she asks her teacher, Irena (Lisa Hale), without waiting for a reply. “To Auschwitz. She won’t be coming back. You die in Auschwitz. You think because we’re children we don’t know.”

Irena, unable to console Raja, reveals her own terrible story: how her 9-year-old daughter was torn from her arms and thrown from a train; how she was prevented from jumping off the train after her; how she has found in Terezin “many children” who need her love. It is an extraordinary moment and manages to avoid histrionics.

As directed by Scott Davidson, “Butterfly” provides both the child actors and the audience a dramatic history lesson. Its timeliness is readily apparent in the recent spate of movies and novels about the Holocaust--not to mention the fact that Hitler was born 100 years ago last week.

“I just want people to know the characters (we play) were real people,” Josh Wheeler, an eighth-grader in the Laguna troupe, told the audience at a post-performance discussion of “Butterfly” on Sunday. Nothing was closer to the truth of the play nor more fitting as a memorial to victims of the Holocaust.

‘I NEVER SAW ANOTHER BUTTERFLY’

A production of the Laguna Playhouse Youth Theater. Written by Celeste Raspanti. Directed by Scott Davidson. Costumes by Dwight Richard Odle. Set by Jacquie Moffett. Lighting and sound by Stephen Shaffer. With Jennifer Triebwasser, Lyndie Robbins, Kevin Jon Schulz, Marc Wasserman, Lisa Hale, Penni Orcutt, Danielle McDermott, Garret Savage, Josh Wheeler, Alexis Mirman, Athena Gam, Craig Brown, Kari Geller, Margaret Alexander, Mike Rosenbluth, Craig Hammill, Katy Killackey, Drew Ostrowski, Rebekah Baker, Andy Kiehl, Honey Udarbe.