A Very Personal Role in Play About Tragic Time

Joseph Greenblatt had vengeance in his heart and arsenic in his pocket as he fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He would kill as many Germans as he could, and not be taken alive to be gassed in a death camp.

That was more than half a century ago. Now, at 84, Greenblatt is one of the few surviving fighters of the ghetto uprising, who is using his painful yet proud memories to bring authenticity to “The Stroop Report,” a play about the defense of the Jewish ghetto that will run at the Chance Theater in Anaheim Hills through Feb. 6.

The Passover Seder scene near the play’s end moves Greenblatt to tears. “Why is this night different from all other nights?” goes the refrain of a song--reenacted on stage--that Jewish children have chanted for centuries during the ritual holiday meal. Hearing it reminds Greenblatt of why the first night of Passover in 1943 was different for him: On that day the Warsaw Uprising had begun, and on that night, at that Seder, Greenblatt saw his doomed parents and older brother for the last time.

The play is the creation of an ethnic tossed salad, a living negation of Adolf Hitler’s dream of racial purity through genocide.

The author is Robert Preston Jones, a Gentile novice playwright who lives in Dallas and studied history at a small Methodist college in Arkansas. The director is 26-year-old Oanh Nguyen, who was 2 when his family fled South Vietnam by boat the day Saigon fell to the communists. The company member who pushed first and hardest to stage the play was actress Jennifer K. Majdali, the daughter of a Palestinian Arab.

The special advisor to the production--in some ways, says Nguyen, almost the co-director--is Greenblatt.

Nguyen had worried that some people might question the validity of a Vietnamese director staging a play about the Holocaust written by a non-Jew. He phoned synagogues and Jewish organizations seeking expert advice on how to keep it authentic.

That’s where Greenblatt has been especially helpful. At 14, he joined Betar, the most militant Zionist youth group in Poland. Members trained in soldiering and martial arts, preparing for the day when they would carry out an armed Jewish exodus from Europe to British-ruled Palestine, which the Jews would claim as their homeland, Israel.

In his late teens, Greenblatt furthered his military training by joining the Polish army reserves--a rarity for a Jew. He was mocked for his religion, he says, but always defended himself.

Greenblatt was in the front line, a lieutenant in a heavy machine-gun unit, when the Polish army crumbled under the German blitz in 1939. He fled to Warsaw, where some of his old comrades from Betar recruited him. They had an ample stock of weapons and ammunition, collected in the streets after fleeing Polish soldiers threw them away. They figured the Allies would soon win the war and they would send the guns to forces fighting for a Jewish state in Israel.

But the Germans had other plans. They created the walled ghetto and penned in about 400,000 Jews.

“It was a hell,” Greenblatt recalled. People starved in the streets. One child grabbed a paper bag from Greenblatt’s sister-in-law and bit into it without looking. It contained shoes.

Families would lay out the bodies of typhoid victims in front of their houses. Greenblatt and others in his resistance unit, the Jewish Military Union, would collect them in covered carts and take them to a cemetery outside the ghetto. On the way back, the carts hid munitions bought from smugglers and profiteers.

In 1942, 300,000 Jews from the ghetto were either killed in the streets or deported to the death camps.

While preparing to fight, Greenblatt fell in love. He and his wife, Irene, were married Jan. 10, 1943. They spent their wedding night on a mattress stuffed with ammunition and hand grenades.

Soon afterward, Greenblatt gave up his wedding ring so it could be melted into gold to buy arms.

Three months later, when the Germans moved to liquidate the ghetto, they met a force of ill-equipped young urban guerrillas.

Greenblatt says he commanded about 80 men and women in a four-block area.

There is scant historical documentation of Greenblatt’s actions. The most authoritative source is “And We Are Not Saved,” a 1963 memoir by David Wdowinski, a leader of the Jewish Military Union who was captured by the Germans and survived the concentration camps. “After [another officer] was arrested, his command was taken over by Joseph Greenblatt, who made a valiant stand,” Wdowinski wrote.

Greenblatt and his fighters held out for 43 days as the ghetto was bombed into rubble around them.

When they could hold out no longer, Greenblatt led the survivors through the sewers and out of the ghetto. Many died as the Germans pumped gas underground; only a handful came out alive. Irene Greenblatt survived the war in hiding in Warsaw. Under the Christian name Jan Bednarcik, Greenblatt became a guerrilla fighter again with the underground Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army. Greenblatt’s sister survived Treblinka and Auschwitz; his parents and brother perished in the death camps, along with about 50 others in his family.

After the war the Greenblatts lived in Belgium, where their only child, Jenny, was born; they moved to New York City in 1950. There, Greenblatt ran a travel agency and was executive director of the American office of the Irgun’s political heirs, the Herut and Likud parties. Two years ago, the Greenblatts moved to Anaheim to be close to Jenny, her husband and the Greenblatts’ teenage grandchildren.

Director Nguyen and others at the Chance Theater saw the universal message in the story of the Warsaw Ghetto.

Majdali, 28, the first company member to read the script, said she had no idea that any Jews had resisted during the Holocaust.

“It’s not necessarily about Jews or Germans. It’s about hatred in any society in the world,” she said. “History can easily be repeated. That’s why I thought this story needed to be told.”

Nowadays, Greenblatt goes twice a day to the Anaheim nursing home where his wife has lived since last summer. Alzheimer’s disease has erased her ability to speak English and much more, he says. She speaks only in Polish.

“For me, it’s heartbreaking,” said Greenblatt.

On opening night, moments after “The Stroop Report” had ended, the old fighter walked the few paces from his front-row seat to the stage. He is barely 5 feet tall but erect and solid, casting a presence. On the lapel of his brown suit jacket was a silver Irgun pin, on his right hand the large gold ring he wore in the Warsaw Ghetto to identify himself at resistance checkpoints. Behind him was the stage set’s replica of the red brick ghetto wall topped with barbed wire. Flanking him was the cast. Fronting him, the audience.

“We fight like Samson in the temple of the Philistines: ‘If I have to die, let me take as many of my enemies with me.’ And we did it,” Greenblatt said in clipped cadences. “Am Yisrael Chai!” he concluded in a husky near-shout, then translated: “The nation of Jews will live forever.”