Keeping Memories of Camp’s Children Alive

Every day there are bus tours into the walled fortress of Czechoslovakia’s Terezin. One of the purposes, according to playwright Bro Harrod, is to “service the young people of Czechoslovakia in teaching them about what happened there.”

What happened there, during the days the Nazis called it Theresienstadt, was the incarceration of 15,000 Jewish children, along with their families. One hundred children were all that were left when the Russians liberated the camp.

Terezin was a “model” camp, shown to Red Cross visitors to belie the rumors of what was really going on under the Nazi yoke. Many artists, singers and theater people existed in the overcrowded quarters. Their effect on the children is the subject of Harrod’s drama, “Flowers of Memory,” playing at the Burbage Theatre.

Harrod, who for many years operated the 13th Street Theatre in Manhattan, while doubling as chairman of the theater department at the New School for Social Research, visited Terezin for research after seeing a traveling exhibit of artwork by the Terezin children.

The children studied surreptitiously, Harrod says, until guards came by, when they returned to their games. Under their teachers, they also produced paintings, songs and poems. “Flowers” is their story.

“They had quite a rich and cultural artistic life,” Harrod states, “sometimes with the knowledge of the guards, sometimes without.”

Louie Piday, co-founder of Los Angeles’ legendary Company Theatre, plays the teacher who guides the young children in the production. The actress-director’s background includes Broadway’s “Oh! Calcutta!” and “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” and she has taught acting at South Coast Repertory and USC for many years. Piday’s 6-year-old daughter, who also appears in “Flowers,” brings home to Piday the frightening truth about what happened in Terezin.

Looking at her daughter, she says, “I saw a 6-year-old child living in a camp, coloring and writing poetry. It was so intensely personal (that) the play was irresistible.” When Piday was reading scripts entered in the National Repertory Theatre’s Play Award competition, she had picked up the script and was unable to put it down.

The teachers at Terezin encouraged the children not to be limited by where they were: behind bars in a prison-like ghetto. They encouraged the children to draw, make collages and paint. The youngsters even composed and performed an operetta. Later, the children’s work was hidden in the walls and under the floorboards of the barracks, where it remained until the camp was liberated.

“They lived,” Piday says, “they created, they played, they danced, they skipped rope. They did all these wonderful childlike things in the midst of all this horror.”

After discovering Harrod’s play, Piday mentioned it to several directors and producers without any takers. Finally, at a social gathering this summer, she mentioned it to Burbage artistic directors Ivan Spiegel and Andy Griggs.

“All right,” Spiegel said, “let’s get it.”

Spiegel has been artistic director of the Burbage Theatre Ensemble for 19 years, at Century City Playhouse and now the Burbage. He directed the long-running hit “Bleacher Bums” and other award-winning productions such as “Letters Home” and “Tom Foolery.”

“It’s a beautiful statement,” Spiegel says, describing Harrod’s play, “because it’s not morbid. You think about movies and plays about the Holocaust, and you keep seeing these images of the Germans beating people, and the gas camps. That’s not what this is. It’s a story about hope, really. It’s about the children, how children lived through the Holocaust. They saw the horrors, but they just kept on going, as children do. Children will adapt to anything.”

Piday adds: “The teachers focused on the fact that, if the children didn’t have enough to eat, they could keep their imaginations alive. They could escape into worlds of such beauty, such comfort, that whatever was done to them, whatever they saw, they would never feel alone, because they were with other children. The whole purpose of the teachers was to give them something to nourish them far beyond the meager, watery soup that they got.”

Even though the camp was formed for propaganda purposes, teachers concentrated on saving the children’s souls, knowing that their lives could not be spared.

“They were determined,” Piday says, “to keep them alive in the fullest sense of childhood, and make up for the deficiency of losing a parent right in front of their eyes. She says the teachers acted like the Pied Piper, taking the children to a place where as long as they stuck together, the pain and the suffering would be minimized. It was an enormous statement about the power of love.”

Piday, Spiegel and playwright Harrod all feel strongly about keeping the memory of the camps alive in the minds of coming generations, so that humanity will never go down that road again. Another cast member, Al Bernie, is just as adamant.

“I know that it’s very important,” Bernie states, “for this story to be brought back, reminding the people every so often. There are forces that make a concerted effort to deny that the Holocaust ever happened. You have to let the young people know, yes, this really did happen.”

Bernie, a television pioneer as star of the 1949-50 CBS variety show, “54th Street Revue,” is remembered for many stage appearances, headlining on “The Ed Sullivan Show,” and successful stints in Las Vegas and at the London Palladium. He’s a comedy legend who was discovered at the age of 13 by Rudy Vallee.

Bernie plays several roles in “Flowers,” including a rabbi with a sense of humor who marries two young people, who provide the love interest. He understands the use of humor to ease pain.

“Ivan’s been after me,” Bernie says. He quotes his director: “ ‘Let’s get some fun into this.’ There’s all the sweetness, but there’s also all the torment that’s going to happen very soon after the story ends.”

“You look back,” Spiegel adds, “and you say, ‘That was terrible.’ When you’re living through things--I’m not saying life was great for the kids--but it was their life. They sang, they had their own communities, they worked hard. But they got through it.”

With sadness in his voice, Harrod explains why he is repeating the message. “I’m sure if you went to any high school in America today and asked any senior who Hitler was, you’d get a lot of people who wouldn’t know.”

“Flowers of Memory” plays at 8 p.m. Thursdays and 7:30 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays, through Dec. 19, at the Burbage Theatre, 2330 Sawtelle Blvd., West Los Angeles. Tickets $12 to $15. Call (310) 478-0897.