Actors Draw on the Life of a Real ‘Shayna Maidel’ : Theater: A psychologist’s memories of the Holocaust help cast members understand the complexities of the Barbara Lebow play to debut in San Diego.

On her first night in Auschwitz--May 22, 1944--the same day Edith Eva Eger found out that her mother had been gassed and cremated in the concentration camp’s infamous death factory--the 16-year-old ballerina danced for the Nazi doctor, Josef Mengele, who had condemned Eger’s mother to death and chosen to save the lives of Edith and her sister, Magda, just hours before.

She got through Mengele’s request for her performance the same way she survived the rest of her harrowing near-year at Auschwitz and other camps. By pretending she was somewhere else--in this case dancing in the Budapest opera house in her native Hungary because that, as she puts it, “was my dream.” At the conclusion of her dance in the dark, dungeon-like barracks, where she was to sleep squeezed six to a bed, Mengele gave her “a little piece of bread” which she shared with her hungry companions.

It is this Holocaust experience--and others--that Eger has been sharing with the cast of “AShayna Maidel,” the Barbara Lebow play which makes its San Diego debut Thursday through May 12 at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre.

According to a theater spokeswoman, it is just coincidence that this play opens on the fiftieth anniversary of the mass extermination of Jews by the Nazis, which is widely believed to have begun in 1941.

But the show’s timeliness complements other events commemorating the event, including a national Holocaust Remembrance Day April 11, a national Days of Remembrance week April 7-14, and, locally, a UC San Diego exhibition “Anne Frank in the World: 1929-1945” May 7-June 7 and a free lecture series, “Racism, Genocide, and the Holocaust,” which begins today with a talk by Holocaust survivor Gerda Klein, the author of “All But My Life” (see accompanying listing). Eger will also participate in forums following performances at the Hahn Cosmopolitan April 13 and 14.

Today, the lightly accented voice of the diminutive, soft-spoken psychologist trembles as she tells her story of her lost childhood, the beatings that ultimately left her unable to dance, and her starvation--down to 40 pounds--on her day of liberation, May 4, 1945, when she lay among the dead on all fours, weakly debating with herself which stalk of grass to eat. Today, at 63, she lives in a spacious, elegantly furnished hilltop La Jolla home.

It was the actress Susanna Thompson who first sought out Eger’s advice as she developed her role in “A Shayna Maidel.” Thompson plays the part of Lusia, a Holocaust survivor who comes to America after the war to find her sister, Rose, and her father, Mordechai. In the play, the mother stayed behind in Poland to care for a sick Lusia while the father and younger daughter go to America and wait for them. But the separation is prolonged when the cost of leaving goes up and the father cannot earn enough money to bring the two across. Mother and daughter are trapped in Poland when the war comes. Lusia, a married woman at the time of the Holocaust, is separated from her husband and loses both her mother and infant daughter in the camps.

Thompson is a San Diego native from a large, Irish Catholic family, and she said she did not know anyone who had experienced the Holocaust. She felt uncertain about how to tackle the part until she remembered meeting Eger, who had told Thompson the story of dancing for Mengele when she came up to praise the actress’s staged reading of the role of a Nazi’s daughter in “Born Guilty” at the Gaslamp last year.

“I decided to take a chance and call her,” Thompson said. “I wanted to know the reality of it--what it felt like, what it smelled like, as much as I could without having lived it.”

Thompson said the contact has proved invaluable in helping the actress understand her character--particularly Lusia’s ability to move from her real life to an imagined life.

“Just listening to Edith helps me deal with this woman’s inner fantasy world. It was hard for me to understand how anyone survived until I came to terms with her ability to maintain an inner life no matter what was happening all around her.”

Thompson called at the right time--at a point in Eger’s life when she was not only willing, but also wanting, to talk about her experiences.

“I didn’t tell anyone I was in Auschwitz for many, many years,” Eger said. “Coming to America, I wanted to assimilate and be a real American. I had my secret and my secret had me. I was part of the conspiracy of silence. I didn’t want my children (she has three children and four grandchildren with her husband, a Czechoslovakian partisan fighter who lost his mother in Auschwitz) to feel different in school. It took me a good 30 years to speak about this. Not until I went back to Auschwitz a few years ago, could I forgive myself for having survived.”

Eger doesn’t see a conflict in having a Jewish survivor portrayed by an Irish Catholic, whose prior experience with the Holocaust had been confined to research in textbooks. In fact, Eger has built a career as a therapist based on the belief that her experience has universal reverberations for anyone who feels himself or herself a victim, without choices.

“I work with children who are sexually abused and battered women who cannot leave their abusive husbands. You don’t have to go to Auschwitz to know suffering.”

Melissa Harte, who plays Rose in the play, responded readily to Eger’s description of the play as being about about people and painful relationships rather than just about the Holocaust. She revealed that her own youth was troubled by her parents’ acrimonious divorce

Harte mostly sat silent as the other two spoke, but she revealed as she was walking out Eger’s door that the pictures that will be used in the play of Jews being shot in trenches are actually pictures of her own family. Harte’s real last name is Sokolsky, and she discovered them just last year after her grandmother died. Like many who lost loved ones in the Holocaust, her grandparents did not want to talk about their experiences.

“I immediately identified with Rose,” Harte said quietly. “The people I lost were people I never met. The difference is that while Rose deals with it on stage, when I first saw the play (in New York) a dam broke inside me and I was able to recognize my history and start the grieving process. I still cry in rehearsals.”

Eger spoke of her sense of hope and her gratitude for every day that she is alive. And despite a difficult life--she and her husband lost everything a second time after they fled the Communists in Czechoslovakia in 1949, and had one child, a son, who suffers from cerebral palsy--she has been able to raise her family and build a life that she is proud of in America. She moved to San Diego from El Paso two years ago and is now on the faculty of the UC San Diego medical school. She works as a private therapist and is consulted for her expertise nationally and internationally in such countries as Germany, Italy and New Zealand.

She talks about the need to stop hating (“to hate would be to give Hitler a posthumous victory,” she says) and her belief that everyone has the potential to find either freedom or imprisonment in the confines of his and her own mind. In the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz, her mother told her that no one could take from her what she put in her head, and that, more than anything, is what helped her to survive, she said.

That same message about the power of the mind is also, for Eger, what the play, “A Shayna Maidel,” is ultimately about.

“I feel it is important for everyone to see this play so they can go home and liberate themselves from their own concentration camps and to know they have choices,” said Eger. “Many people today feel they have no choices. But even in Auschwitz we had choices.”

And yet, at the same time it is clear that while it may be healing to conjure up the past, it is also draining. Because of what happened to her, Eger admits that she tires easily.

And there are events she can never forget, such as the moment when Mengele motioned her mother to the left line and she and her sister to the right. She instinctively went to follow her mother, but Mengele stopped her.

“Your mother is going to take a shower,” she remembers him telling her.

Later she asked a guard when she would see her mother.

“She pointed to the gas chamber and the place where smoke was rising up and said, ‘She’s burning there now. Now you can talk about your mother in the past tense.’

“I will never forget that,” Eger said, her voice breaking again.

“I grieve over the childhood I never had. I grieve over the fact that I danced for Dr. Mengele in Auschwitz. I grieve that I was beaten so severely that I couldn’t dance anymore. I believe as I talk about it that I will never get over it. And parts of me will always be in Auschwitz.”

“A Shayna Maidel,” a play by Barbara Lebow, appears Thursday through May 12 at the Gaslamp Quarter Theatre Company’s Hahn Cosmopolitan Theatre, 444 4th Ave. Performances are at 8 p.m. Tuesday-Saturday and 2 p.m. Sunday.