Theatre-train brings Shoah story to central Europe

PRAGUE (AFP) ― In a tribute to Holocaust victims, a Czech theatre troupe is roaming the rails of central Europe this summer aboard a train converted into a stage for a play about Jews sent to Nazi death camps.

“I thought about this idea for a long time ― to stage a play on a train, a symbol of Jewish transports during World War II,” said Pavel Chalupa, director of the Nine Gates festival of Jewish culture and mastermind of the project.

“The Nazi regime transported Jews to Auschwitz and other concentration and death camps on board cattle wagons,” said Chalupa, who has teamed up with Prague’s Pod Palmovkou theatre.

Travelling through the Czech Republic, Germany and Poland, the symbolic ‘Train of No Return’ will present a theatrical adaptation of “A Prayer for Katerina Horovitzova,” a novel by Arnost Lustig (1926-2011), a Czech Jew who had survived the Holocaust.

The story takes place in 1943 on a train to the infamous Auschwitz death camp in Poland. The Nazis play a cynical game with a group of wealthy Jewish businessmen, promising them freedom in exchange for money, and a young Polish Jew, Katerina Horovitzova.

But when she is asked to dance naked before a Nazi officer, she decides to take revenge for the humiliation.

Inspired by the true story of a Polish actress, Lustig wrote the novel in a single night in 1964. “Women possess that little something that keeps poets alive,” he used to say.

“I am drawn to the Jewish theme ... I am very interested in the history of the Jews,” said Denisa Pfauserova, one of the two actresses who alternate playing Katerina, who with the businessmen in the end perishes at Auschwitz.

The theatre-train of five wagons will start off in July with stops at 14 Czech railway stations before taking a highly symbolic tour of Wannsee, Prague, Krakow and Auschwitz in late August, Chalupa said.

In Wannsee, a suburb of Berlin, leaders of the Third Reich gathered on Jan. 20, 1942, to agree what they termed “the final solution of the Jewish question,” or Nazi Germany’s plan of genocide against European Jews.

In the Nazi-occupied Polish city of Krakow, the Germans liquidated a Jewish ghetto on March 13, 1943.

And at the nearby Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp, an estimated 1.1 million people including about a million Jews from across Europe were killed from 1940 to 1945 at Nazi Germany’s most infamous killing site.