In the summer of 1945, a survivor of the Auschwitz- Birkenau death camp wrote this to his sister in Palestine: “You, over there, cannot imagine even a hundredth part of the suffering, fear, humiliation and every kind of bullying that we lived through. People who live and think as normal people cannot possibly understand.”
With “The Boy from Block 66,” playwright Kody C. Jones makes us understand. His adaptation of Limor Regev’s memoir of survivor Moshe Kessler is so raw, so horrific, so evocative, it’s like a sucker punch to the emotional gut.
That’s by design, says Jones.
“It’s not only our artistic obligation to make this right, and to be accurate and to speak honest truth in the story we’re telling, but it’s a moral obligation, as well,” said Jones. “I think the bravery of Moshe Kessler and the other survivors is what’s inspired us to keep passing that torch.”
Jones and his cast convey that truth and brutal honesty in two fundamental ways. The first is by structuring the play as a look back, which an early scene underscores.
Kessler: “I must admit, I don’t know where to start.”
Regev: “Ah, Moshe, I’d like to make this as easy and natural as possible. Just think of it as telling a story. Every story must have an end and a middle, but also a beginning. So just start there. Think about when you were a young boy in Hungary, your family, your friends. Just start from the beginning.”
The scenes rapidly unfold as Kessler recounts his experiences from 1938 through 1945 to the woman who’s writing his memoir.
Gestapo officer: “Take only what you can carry. Leave all other belongings in your home.”
Moshe: “I remember the looks on the faces of our neighbors as we were being taken away. They stared at us as if we were common criminals. But they never even knew us. These were our neighbors! This was our home.”
This storytelling device pulls in the audience, triggering their curiosity.
To humanize the characters’ plights, Playwright Jones goes one step further. He has the characters speak directly to the audience. In the process, each audience member morphs from passive listener into confidant and compatriot. The characters’ fears, pain, horror and despair become the audience’s.
Jones experienced those horrors himself as he adapted the memoir into the play.
“Personally, it really hit me kind of hard, and I’d have to walk away for a while,” said Jones. “I remember multiple times, especially writing some of the more traumatic scenes where I’d just have to leave, I’d have to walk around the neighborhood, call somebody or turn on a movie just to get my mind away from it. As a writer I have to put myself in the shoes of those characters in order to best translate their perspectives, and by doing that, you’re putting yourself through a lens of their trauma and that can be challenging, but it’s got to happen.”
As incidents of anti-Semitism rise, it’s our obligation to remind ourselves of the inevitable consequences of scapegoating and dehumanizing any segment of our population.
“The Boy from Block 66” is onstage at Arts Bonita Center for Performing Arts now through Sunday.
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“The Boy from Block 66” follows Moshe Kessler, who was 13 when he and his family were sent to a ghetto for Jews. From there, he and his family were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, where his mother and younger brother perished in the gas chamber upon their arrival. Kessler would eventually pass through four other concentration camps before ending up at Buchenwald. When the war ended, he escaped execution by fleeing the Nazis primarily because of the efforts of Czech resistance fighters, whose efforts saved the lives of over 900 boys interred in Block 66.
The play is based on Kessler’s memoir, as told by author Limor Regev. She was friends with Kessler’s daughter and agreed to write the memoir as a gift for Kessler’s 90th birthday. The book became a bestseller and has been translated into 10 languages.
“Like a lot of Holocaust survivors, it was something that he just wasn’t ready to talk about [before then],” observed Kody Jones, who adapted Regev’s book for the stage. “It took that long, until he was nearly 90, to share his experiences [in the death camps] so we could all learn about it, and learn from history, to create brighter futures and a better society.”
Jones decided to include scenes in which Kessler relates his experiences to Regev in order to reinforce the play’s underlying theme of learning lessons from history.
“As the writer of the play, that was something very important to me,” said Jones. “The novel doesn’t include anything about the author. It doesn’t mention anything about the interview. That’s something I added because the whole objective of doing a show like this is learning from the past, and to do that, we need to reflect and connect in parallel to the present.”
The play accurately tracks the plight of the Jewish population as they were herded into ghettos, taken by train to death camps and separated upon arrival into those who were selected to "go to the left" to work as slave laborers and those who would "go to the right" to be exterminated in the gas chamber.
One of the most poignant scenes in “The Boy from Block 66” depicts the women, including a gold medal Olympian, who were about to be gassed, telling the audience of their hopes and dreams and aspirations, which would soon be extinguished “just because I happened to be born a Jew.”
The play includes several scenes in which the Germans lied to their Jewish prisoners in order to ensure their cooperation. They told Jews they were being relocated to work camps in the countryside where they’d have their own bungalows and plenty to eat. They were told they'd be given a hot meal and a day off to recover from an illness or injury. Each lie would inevitably lead to degradation and death. The Jews wanted to believe the lies. Deception and self-delusion went hand in glove. Both were amplified by hopelessness and isolation.
Every step along Kessler’s journey encapsulates the horrors of the Holocaust. Jones fears that a growing segment of the population has either forgotten or never heard stories like these.
“In high school, we had a class that was all about the Holocaust,” said Jones. “Why I wanted to adapt the book and tell this story now is we don’t see that anymore. We see people who don’t know what it is, or even deny it, and I see danger there.”
A recent study conducted by the Conference on Jewish Material Claims Against Germany in the United States found that nearly half of the Americans who responded to a survey couldn’t name a single concentration camp or ghetto established by the Nazis during World War II. Similar percentages of the people surveyed in the U.S. and England, France, Austria, Germany, Poland, Hungary and Romania were unaware that 6 million Jews were killed during the Holocaust.
Holocaust misinformation, disinformation and denial is also a significant factor, particularly on social media platforms.
While the material is admittedly somber, the play does capture moments of hope, triumph and resilience. Buchenwald’s Block 66 epitomizes many of these themes.
“Most people don’t know what Block 66 was,” said Jones. “It was a specific barracks where a lot of the kids would go due to the efforts of several underground resistance fighters. They wanted to protect the children, namely Antonin Kalin (1902-1990), who was the head of this underground movement. They kept all of the kids there, and would lie to the SS that they were sick and had dysentery so that nobody would check up on them or make the kids work.”
Jones went on to point out that as the Allies approached the camp, the SS gave orders to kill all of the remaining inmates, including the children in Block 66. After that, they were to burn the camp to the ground to eliminate all evidence of the atrocities they had perpetrated. To thwart the SS, the underground staged a rebellion, and Kessler was spared.
The play ends with the liberation of Buchenwald. But the actual story continued. Sick and suffering from advanced malnutrition, many Holocaust survivors died in the days, weeks and months following their liberation. That situation was exacerbated by the U.S. Army’s neglect of the survivors’ medical and nutritional needs, which The New York Times characterized as a continuation of Hitler's genocide of the Jews.
While Adolf Hitler may have ordered the “Final Solution to the Jewish Question,” which Adolf Eichmann executed with machine-like precision, anti-Semitism didn’t end with the Third Reich. Numerous Jews who survived the Holocaust were killed by the locals when they attempted to return to their homes.
For example, five Jews who’d survived Auschwitz, Mauthausen and Buchenwald were driving on the main road to the Polish town of Nowy Targ on Easter Sunday in 1945 when they were stopped, ordered out of their car and shot by former members of the Polish Home Army. It wasn’t an isolated incident. So many Polish Jews were murdered in the aftermath of the war that more than half the survivors fled the country, seeking permanent refuge in the United States, Britain, Australia, Latin America and Palestine.
Given this backdrop, it’s miraculous that Moshe Kessler survived to eventually share his story some 70 years later.
“Boy from Block 66” is not just another retrospective. Its themes remain timely.
“I think we live in a turbulent time, when there’s lots of division,” Jones observed. “We’re still saddled with prejudice and racism, and these are the types of sparks that can turn into flames of evil. We’re all just humans, with the same needs and wants and pursuits for happiness, and there’s nothing to fear from each other. So this [play] is more about having faith in ourselves and one another, loving one another, accepting one another, or at the very least, having tolerance of one another and our differences versus letting those sparks of hate turn into flames of evil.”
Support for WGCU’s arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.