‘Time’ in Memorial : 2 Death Camp Prisoners Bear Witness; Their Experience Helps in Staging Tale of Survival

He was 134923. She was 82890. They got their numbers in the camps--he in Auschwitz, she in Birkenau.

You can see the blue digits tattooed on their forearms--his on the outside, hers on the inside--because it is a warm day and they are both wearing short-sleeve shirts.

Mary Kress’ grandchildren sometimes ask about her tattoo. She tells the youngest it’s her telephone number. When they’re older, she’ll tell them the real story. Even then, they may never truly understand. How do you explain the impossible?

“There are not enough words in the vocabulary,” says Henry Kress, who speaks four languages besides English.

He is tall and tan, still handsome at age 70. She, too, looks vibrant and attractive, younger than her 69 years.

When he was deported to Auschwitz as a teen-ager in the early summer of 1943, he already had survived three years in different camps. She was deported to Birkenau, the women’s camp about five miles from Auschwitz, during the summer of 1944 after 14 months in hiding with nine other Jews. They had lived in a windowless 7-by-10-foot room built behind a fake wall in the home of a Polish tannery worker who ultimately turned them in.

“Let’s say you tell a guy an unbelievable story,” Henry said. “He’s gonna walk away thinking you don’t know what you’re talking about. He’s gonna think it’s a hard-luck story. So we tell people what we understand that they will understand.”

Sometimes they understand so little, it surprises him.

“I had an experience with an educated guy. We were in a business meeting. He says to me, ‘Henry, when you were in the concentration camp, did you go to school?’ If a guy like that can ask me such a question, what is the point of telling him?”

The point, of course, is bearing witness.

And today in particular, on the 50th anniversary of Yom HaShoah--the Jewish Day of Remembrance to commemorate the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau and all the other Nazi concentration camps--it is sacred to bear witness to the Holocaust.

Of the approximately 6 million Jews and millions of others exterminated by the Nazis, those who survived need to tell their stories, not just to mourn the dead but to honor the living.

“We don’t want people to forget,” Henry says. “We don’t want to forget our loved ones. But I think it’s more for us than for them. I don’t like to pretend that this is only for them.”

To that end, they have been acting as technical advisers to director Peter Henry Schroeder for his Menorah Theatre staging of “Playing for Time,” the Arthur Miller teleplay based on a memoir by Fanya Fenelon, who also managed to survive in Auschwitz.

The production opens tonight at the Jewish Community Center in Costa Mesa as part of thiB year’s observance of Yom HaShoah. Vanessa Redgrave won an Emmy for her portrayal of Fenelon in the original telecast on NBC during the early ‘80s. Robin Dunne will star in the role at the community center.

Neither of the Kresses, both from Poland, met Fenelon, a Jewish cabaret singer from Paris. But Mary marched past her twice a day for about seven months whenever she worked outside the camp.

“There was a women’s orchestra at Birkenau,” Mary recounts. “And she was in the orchestra. It played at the gate every morning and every night. We went out before dawn, and we returned after dark. The orchestra played when we left and played when we came back. Unbelievable.”

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No more so than the infamous words inscribed on the gate of every Nazi concentration camp from Auschwitz and Birkenau to Dachau and Ravensbruck: “Arbeit macht Frei.” Work makes you free.

Schroeder asked the Kresses to advise him about the authenticity of production details as well as the credibility of the play itself.

“He is very determined to make sure that nobody deviates from the way it should be,” Henry says. “And we have adjusted quite a bit of it.”

The play is true, he notes, but not everything happens exactly as it did in reality.

“For instance, there is a sex scene between a Kapo and a prisoner,” Henry says. “The Kapos ran things. They supervised the work crews. But they were prisoners too. The way the play had it, you’d think they were Germans. Everybody wanted to be a Kapo because they got privileges. But they didn’t get as many privileges as you’d think. Occasionally, they got a little more food than the rest of us.

“Their main privilege was that they didn’t have to work. They could assign you to the worst of it. I said everybody wanted to be a Kapo, but not everybody could be that brutal. For instance, the Kapo would report to the SS guard that he’s taking out a hundred prisoners. The SS man would tell him, ‘I want you to bring back 90.’ It was the Kapo who had to decide which 10 are going to be killed. But at least the Kapo was safe. That was the big privilege.”

If Henry learned anything in Auschwitz, he learned that there are no absolutes. For example, some Kapos were kind.

“We cannot say that all of them were evil,” he says. “People have a tendency to think in black and white. It was not that way. There were many shades.”

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Indeed, Mary owes her life several times over to the woman who supervised her barracks, not a Kapo exactly but also answerable to the Germans. This supervisor, a rabbi’s daughter from Czechoslovakia, realized that Mary and the woman who bunked with were daughter and mother. To reveal it, however, would have been the equivalent of a death sentence.

“This woman did not say anything,” Mary explains. “All the time we were in Auschwitz, nobody else knew. My mother and I had made a pact not to admit it, because the Germans separated families. If you clung to somebody, they purposely tore the two of you apart.”

When Mary came down with typhoid and rheumatic fever, she would not have survived had her mother not been there to care for her and help keep her illness secret from the Germans. If they found out you were too weak to work, she explains, you were almost invariably left to die or gassed and sent to the ovens.

The supervisor also saved Mary from Josef Mengele, the “butcher of Auschwitz” also known in the camp as “the angel of death,” who performed gruesome medical “experiments” on prisoners that almost always killed them.

“One time there was a role call for our barracks in the middle of the day,” Mary remembers, “and here comes Mengele. Now I didn’t know who Mengele was. I was new there. He goes up and down the line, very slowly, and he picks me out of the lineup. I didn’t even know what I was being picked for.

“This rabbi’s daughter, she sees me being picked out. She didn’t know what to do. Mengele walks away somewhere. Maybe it was back into our barracks. I didn’t see. But this woman walks toward me. She was very upset. She says from behind me in Czechoslovakian, a word that meant, ‘Get away from here!’ That’s all I heard.

“Where am I going to go? Well, there was a group of women talking not far away from the lineup. So I stepped out and joined them. Mengele comes out from wherever he was and starts to holler, ‘Where are the 10 girls?’ He picked 10 girls. He didn’t remember who we were because he didn’t write down our numbers. We all looked alike. We all had shaved heads. We all wore rags. We all disappeared.

“He had no girls. For some reason--don’t ask me why--he left from our barracks and didn’t pick more. So this woman didn’t just save my life. She saved 10 lives. How do you explain what happened? There is no explanation.”

Schroeder, who teaches an acting workshop at the community center and has directed at the Tiffany Theatre in Los Angeles, says the Kresses have inspired the entire cast in “Playing for Time.”

“When you talk to Henry and Mary,” he says, “they’ll tell you that survival was just luck. You were at the right place at the right moment, and you got out. But they are an inspiration. They represent courage, the ability to survive the darkest of circumstances, the will to fight back, which is exactly what this play is about.”

Last year Thomas Keneally, the author of “Schindler’s List,” spoke at the community center on Yom HaShoah. But this production, Schroeder says, is the center’s most ambitious undertaking yet to observe the remembrance of the Holocaust.

“For all of us,” Shroeder says, “it has been one of the most moving experiences we’ve had. I hope the audience will feel that way.”

* “Playing for Time” opens today at 8 p.m. at the Jewish Community Center, 250 E. Baker St., Costa Mesa, where it continues Saturday at 8 p.m; Sunday at 2:30 pm., and May 4 and 6 at 8 p.m. $12.50. Discounts for students and senior citizens. (714) 755-0340.