“Budzyn” reflects artistic depth, promotes vision of understanding By Susie Davidson May 20, 2010 On May 6, the World Day of Prayer, Guila Clara Kessous was honored as a Knight of the Order of Arts and Letters (Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres) at Harvard University’s Sanders Theatre by Anne Miller, Cultural Attachée of the French Embassy in Boston. But the literary and cultural theorist was there to bestow recognition as well. Prior to receiving the award, Kessous, a visiting scholar pursuing a postdoctorate degree at Harvard University’s Center of European Studies, unveiled her play “Budzyn and the Show of Shows,” based on the WWII recollections of Holocaust survivor Henry S. Newman. Theatrical expression and human rights have fueled Kessous’ remarkable academic career. A scholar with a degree from the French government and a researcher with a doctorate in ethics and aesthetics, she is also a French Academy summa cum laude Gold Medal winner for Dramatic Arts (as an actress in classical and modern theatre) as well as a 2006 recipient of the French State Diploma of Performing Arts from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. From the other side of the stage, she has produced and directed over twenty performances in both the US and Europe. Kessous has taught at Harvard, Boston University, the Sorbonne, and the Institut Universitaire Elie Wiesel de Paris. Her sponsors include UNESCO, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization, and the UN (for directing "Hilda" and "Tribute to Human Rights", respectively), and the French National Center for Scientific Research. She has worked with artists John Malkovich, James Taylor, Marisa Berenson, Daniel Mesguich, and Theodore Bikel. She met Newman though her work with Wiesel, under whose guidance she received two Ph.D.s, one in ethics and aesthetics, and another in French Literature, both at Boston University. (Her CV also lists a doctorate in Comparative Drama, an M.A. in Comparative Literature and a B.A. in Literature from the University of Metz, in addition to M.A.s in History from the Sorbonne and in Pedagogy and Linguistics from the University of Rouen, an M.B.A. from ESSEC, the International Business School in Europe in Paris, and a B.A. in Philosophy from the University of Strasbourg, France.) Currently at Harvard, her focus is on “Theatre Engage" as reflected in the works of Sartre and Camus. Fortunately, all that knowledge has neither rendered Kessous overly cerebral, nor bereft of human emotion. “Knowing that Wiesel trusted my work, Henry decided I was the right person to adapt his life into a play, because at this time, I am the only specialist in Wiesel's theatre,” she explained (in 2007, Kessous translated and staged “Once Upon a Time,” a previously unreleased Wiesel manuscript. Indeed, the intense tragedy and drama of the New York-based Newman’s youthful saga correlated with her expertise in the humanities and theatre. However, she was personally affected as well, and felt that she was the only one who could carry out his wish to preserve his story. While Kessous is two generations removed from the terrors of the Third Reich, racial persecution has impacted her family. Her mother is a direct descendant of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French artillery officer falsely convicted and imprisoned for treason in 1894. Although he was exonerated in 1899, returning to the ranks of the French Army, “L’affaire Dreyfus” and its inherent anti-Semitism, which spurred the writer Emile Zola to pen a career-risking open letter of protest, “J’accuse,” still invokes anger and hostility among Jews worldwide.

Kessous’ grandfather Guilbert, for whom Kessous was named Guila, was later victimized during the Holocaust. “During the Shoah,” she recalled, “he was kept in a camp that was especially harsh, because it was only meant for people from the resistance.” Though her grandfather, a city planner for the French government, managed to escape from the camp and to survive the war despite recapture by the Nazis, his suffering remains a family trauma. Kessous’ paternal grandfather was an Orthodox rabbi in Morocco. “He owned a little shop,” she recalled, “and he read Torah all day, between clients.” Kessous’ play centers around the Nazi camp Budzyn, located about three miles from Krasnik, Poland. Newman’s suspenseful, emotional testimony is also entwined within the production, which begins with Newman himself voicing his recollections. After losing his family during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, he was sent with his younger brother Benjamin to the labor camp, whose commander, Reinhold Felix, was infamous for the savagery he zealously inflicted upon inmates. Prior to the calamitous turns his life had taken, Newman had studied dramatic arts, and Felix somehow knew of his background. The commander asked him to organize a small show with the prisoners. “He said that if the show did not cause him to laugh, he would cut Henry’s throat, and personally make sure that he suffered in slow agony, in front of the other prisoners,” said Kessous. Newman was ultimately liberated from Dachau, and dedicated the play to the memory of Benjamin, who did not survive. “I was fascinated by Newman’s ability to detach himself from the camp’s atmosphere in order to create this show, proving that he had the capacity of abstraction necessary for theater, which supposes a tacit pact between the viewer and the viewed,” said Kessous. “The viewer knows he needs to be quiet, and the viewed knows that he has to deserve to be looked at, because it is not the individual who is seen, but the ensemble, the show as a whole.” She portrayed Henry as an aware and active participant in the play. “He has a heightened consciousness of his body in the theatrical space: he is able to pretend to the Germans that he is an expert mechanic so that he can be assigned to a factory, and to reassure his brother that all will go well with the performance,” she said. Kessous believes the real Newman survived because of his capacity for adaptation and abstraction. The play closely follows Newman’s testimony, so that it becomes a mix within the media, as well as the major dramatic vein. “What intrigues me about the testimony is the fantastic use of theater as a communication tool,” said Kessous. “The commander, who has full power over his prisoners, who has the right to keep them alive or dead and who ruthlessly takes full advantage of his position to satisfy his drive for violence by playing all sorts of sadistic games, is somehow aware of his own inhumanity.” By asking Henry to remind him of his humanity through laughter, she explains, the commander subconsciously agrees to transfer his power, to manipulate the macrocosmic structure of the camp as a whole. “He lacks opportunities to laugh as well as the power of distraction, because he is bored.” Bored? Yes, Kessous maintains: “In a way, through his request to Henry, he is trying to regain access to what he has lost and what he knows the prisoners retain: a piece of humanity,” she said. A multilingual magma of voices of survivors opens the production. Gradually, a vocal track, “My name is Henry Newman” escalates into an auditory, thematic declaration. Dancing by actors playing inmates ensues. We see the family in the Warsaw Ghetto, in a heart-rendering vignette of the mother caught trying to obtain water needed for Passover matzah. Newman’s arrival at Budzyn and his interactions with inmates and officials follow. His character remains on stage through the performance, which winds through a torture scene in which Felix mandates that prisoners strike other prisoners until they die, and then, sing the song

“Marianna.” Felix later randomly hangs twelve inmates, represented by four dancers and the song “The Shtetl is Burning.” Newman’s play then fulfills its terrible task, culminating in the commander, in his mirth, shooting a prisoner. In a subsequent scene, a woman named Clara appears and tells him that his manuscript will be preserved. She leaves; he is alone, but with an assured legacy. An unmistakable vocal, recorded by Barbra Streisand for the production, sings “Avinu Malkainu (Our Father, Our King),” a prayer that signals the end of the Day of Atonement in Jewish worship. A prayer by Holocaust survivor Rosian Zerner of Newton emotively closes the production, the screen filled with the words “Never Again,” amid a chorus by composer and Holocaust victim Edwin Geist (Zerner’s uncle, with whom she was interned in the Kovno Ghetto in Lithuania). The show, presented by Harvard Hillel, was ardently publicized by arts promoter Dan Yonah Ben-Dror Marshall, who directs the Brookline/Greater Boston Community Center for the Arts and by Sasha Yakhkind, the production’s publicity and marketing intern, as well as the Center of European Studies, and members of the Boston-area Holocaust community. The capacity crowd included Cambridge Mayor David P. Maher, as well as Patricia Craig, the Executive Director of the Harvard University Center for European Studies; Lori Gross, the Associate Provost for Arts and Culture; Marek Lesniewski-Laas, Honorary Consul of the Republic of Poland; Friedrich Löhr, Consul General of Germany to New England; Rick Mann, President of the New England Holocaust Memorial; Wolfgang K. Vorwerk, former Consul General of Germany to New England; Rony Yedidia, Deputy Consul General of Israel to New England; Father Stephen Zukas, a leader of the religious community of Lithuania in Boston. Eric Cohen, Chair of the Massachusetts Coalition to Save Darfur and Investors Against Genocide; and President and Director of Harvard Hillel Dr. Bernie Steinberg, some of whom addressed the audience. Also present were members of the three area German-Jewish Dialogue groups, and the Greater Boston Child Holocaust Survivor Group.

Holocaust survivors’ stories have been portrayed through myriad format; Kessous encapsulates this tradition in Budzyn. “My work is to engage with the testimony, and to attempt to use theater to reconcile historical truth with artistic impression,” she said. “It is transmission, not appropriation, or even creation.” She notes an emotional paradox: “It is a kind of lassitude mixed with a profound desire to go forward in fixing the Shoah’s place in societal and historical consciousness, once and for all.” She hopes Budzyn might continue to reach a wider audience, beginning with the Sanders production. “By performing this play during the International Day of Prayer, my goal is to reach beyond the idea of community, to present the idea of universality,” she said. The dreadfully ironic, full-circle parallel of Felix’ desire for enforced stagecraft and her own theatrical vision is not lost on Kessous. But in her case, it is the necessary evil. “The ability to laugh, to forget the exterminator and exterminated, is only accessible through the experience of staging,” she said. “Once again, it is thanks to the dramatic arts that Henry is able to survive, as he writes, ‘To hear people laugh in this unholy place was the greatest gratification anyone could ask for.’” Kessous is presently in St. Petersburg, staging a theatrical piece on the Armenian Genocide for the 16th Festival of the Educational Bridge Project, which links American and Russian artists. There, as an author and a director in residence, she will also conduct multiple workshops for young actors. Following this, she will produce, direct and star in August

Strindberg’s “The Bridal Crown,” which concerns womens’ rights, at the Avignon Theatre Festival in the South of France. She hopes to return to the US in January 2011 to stage another production of Budzyn in New York, at Henry Newman’s request. Through these and other, future opportunities, Kessous’ core mission is certain to remain resolute. “Through my teaching, performing and directing skills, I hope to enrich a holistic view of artistic resources, in order to help promote understanding, awareness, and the possibility for social change," she said. Susie Davidson has written for the Jewish Advocate since 2000, is a former business columnist for the Brookline Tab and arts writer for the Cambridge Chronicle, and has contributed to the Boston Sunday Globe, the Boston Herald (op-ed), and the Forward. She has written “I Refused to Die: Stories of Boston-Area Holocaust Survivors and Soldiers who Liberated the Concentration Camps of World War II” (2005); “Jewish Life in Postwar Germany” (2006); “Selected Poetry of Susie D” (2006); and edited a collection of remarks made by former German Consul to New England Wolfgang K. Vorwerk at area Holocaust community events (2008) (All Ibbetson Street Press, Somerville). She is the Coordinator of the Boston chapter of The Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life. Her next book, “From the Greatest to the Latest: D-Day Vet Irving Smolens Looks at 2010,” is due out this fall.