 Welcome everybody here at the Martin E. Siegel Theater Center, the Graduate Center CUNY in Midtown Manhattan. It's a cold day in New York, but a sunny day and it's an important day. Today is January 7th. It's the Holocaust Remembrance Day. And to honor this day and all that is connected to it, we are today presenting a live reading here on Zoom in English, Mother's Courage. He's a great, great, great, or was a great, great theater artist, Hungarian, German, much beloved by his actors, a great writer, a great mind. Someone who worked with Bertolt Breitsch wrote it for Hitchcock, had his own theater company and also was a very, very gifted director in one of the most beautiful places I've seen were directed by him. And I also knew him a little bit. So it's a great, great honor. Today we have with us two actors who have dedicated part of their lives to the work of George Taburi and his great play by Mother's Courage. We have with us Siegrun Schneider-Kietner, who will be the mother in the play, and Thomas Bockerman, who is going to be the son. Both of them work at the Staatstheater Kassel where this production originated. It's their first Zoom reading ever. And I think also of the Staatstheater Kassel, the first live one, we are very honored to have them with us. We are doing this in collaboration also with the National Jewish Theater Foundation, NJFT, the Holocaust Theater International Initiatives, which is based at the university in Miami. It's an important institution that keeps us alert on the fact that we have to remember. And as someone said, it is important to learn from history that we don't learn from history. So it's good to be reminded from that. Our partners are Tom Page, New York, where this production will be showing throughout this year, the Synagogue Center in Felsburg in Germany, and of course the Staatstheater Kassel, a very honor that we have this collaboration. A little bit about the play that is based on the true story of the legendary theater artist George Tabori, the writer, the memoir of his Jewish mother, who miraculously and in great act of personal courage, managed to escape deportation in 1944 in Budapest. And now we are going to learn how Elsa, this kind of unwavering Hungarian Jew who stayed in the city to take care of her asthmatic sister. We're gonna hear what happened and we also are gonna see how George Tabori thought about telling a story. So we all remember of what is important and significant and meaningful. And as a warning, how fast things can and will change if we don't pay attention. So here we go. And we have the reading, Thomas and Sigrun, can you hear us? Yes, I think you are in Europe, you're in Spain at the moment on an island and thank you, what time is it? Where are you? It's five o'clock beyond Tenerife, it's one of the Canary Islands. Fantastic, fantastic. So then let's hear, George Tabori, my mother's courage, here we go. Sigrun, can we start? Now? Yeah, people are waiting. Oh, just, yeah. I mean, you should put on your glasses. Moment, just a second. Yeah, but put on your glasses, you can't read otherwise. Oh, for sure. Here I am, Maria. Can we start now? Yeah. You sure? Thank you, sure. Okay, my mother's courage. One summer's day in the year 44, a vintage year for death, my mother put on her black dress. The one with the lace collar. The one she always wore as befitting lady for her weekly gin game at her sister, Martha. It was 10 30 a.m., just in time, like ever. Yeah, these little attempts to accuracy. She also put on her black hat, wax flowers around the rim. Wisdom. And a pair of white gloves, the left arm mended, got resides in small details. Wax flowers around the rim. Correct me if I'm wrong. I can't remember wax flowers around the rim. That was a black straw with a white silk ribbon. I know, mother, but wax flowers around the rim sounds better. Yes, my darling, it does. There she stood, looking at herself in the mirror with those incomparable blue eyes of hers. No, no, no, no, no, no. Which were too safe for life that day and let out a groan as it was her custom. Why don't you give us an example of that famous ground? Here? Yes. Oh, yeah. There was always something to groan about. Depths, measles, infidelities, cousins bronchitis, burnt meat, the absence of two sons. Only this time, she had greater reasons for groaning her husband. What happened to be your father at the same time? He had recently been arrested for what he was. I do. And a Marxist of the reformist movement. That in addition. A man caught between doors as it were languishing six weeks in a jail temporary. Set up at girl's school. Yes, our fascism. No, no, no, there. Okay, okay. There fascism was rather poor one, a rather poor one, quite Chevy in comparison to the neighboring pump. The green shirts of our local thugs were greasy at the collar. Their boots unpollished and their guns frequently jammed when ducked into the necks of their victims. Listen, Oditsky. Oditsky, for instance, used to wear a mixed pair of boots. One brown, one black. As he kicked your father down the stair. Yes. Having grown and blown a wisp of hair out of her eyes. Another one of her habits. My mother pecked her purse with her customary objects. Keys, a hanky. A chapstick. A snapshot of her two exiled sons. No, wait, wait, wait. I brought it for you. Listen, grinning under an almond tree in London. But that's really cute. I give it back, please. OK, OK. A postcard from her husband, written in jail, asking for clean underwear. And Pascale's ponces. A tin penge, in case she should lose a gin and an apple for emergencies. An apple, me, with my poor teeth. Correct me, Van Ra. Plums, more likely. They were sweet this season. OK, plums. Plums. Then she left quickly through the back door in order to avoid the chibotness. Can't you leave them out? No, no, that's impossible. They are important for the story. A fish-faced family of fascists who were occupying by government decree three of four rooms of our apartment, including the boys' room in the back, where I had lost my virginity to a sexophonist's shabby wife. To whom? To the wife of the sexophonist. You didn't know that, did you? Oh, but you were only 12. So what? People of this sort, she bought neck, had said on arrival, as he and his fish-faced brood were standing awkwardly about crates and boxes, do not deserve such luxury. He was referring to the spaciousness of my apartment, not my initiation into manhunt. His wife, though she believed that Jews were fond of drinking the blood of Christian babes, would sometimes show small signs of charity, leaving a pot of mousfet or a few apples outside my mother's door. Plums. The sun is leaving the table and playing a little bit on the piano. What's that? A modest musical effect. The piano? The piano, which stayed in the confiscated part of the apartment, was used by the Robotniks for storing canid food. My mother, however, had used it for as long as I can remember to express some love and hope. Correct me if I'm wrong, mother, but in all the years that I've known you, you learned to play with difficulty only one song, a German one, my last memory of it being a one-finger version in the dust. In times of stress when I had scarlet fever or your husband came back from the war, froze spitten, you sung this German song, sometimes unaccompanied. You held my hand for his until one day, the day I believe, when you sooth the yellow star on the breast of your good black coat, you stopped singing it all together. Jewish pig. When she walked out into the sun of the open corridor crossing the courtyard of the tenement, she was aware of the little eyes peering at her from behind curtains, still curious at her transformation officially decreed from dear neighbor into stinking Jewish pig. A red count stinking Jewish pig. Dirty Jew stinking Jewish pig. Jewish cunt. The only person who did lose her hatred with verbal insults was the genitus wife. This was Mr. Bosch-Bosch-Gerl. A froggy creature who crowed the latest fashionable curses from the gloom of her lodge, like red count or Jewish pig. My mother's response was merrily a semitic sigh as if to say, well, what do you expect? Well, what do you expect? Or that's the way it goes. That is the way it goes. Gerl's words followed her into the street like a portrait. Stinking Jew. And evaporated in the sun. She stopped for a moment to enjoy the summer on her face and continued past the grossest. He no longer waved at her through the window. The barbers. Go into your first haircut. And the drapers now shuttered, for he too had been recently arrested. By the time she had crossed the patch of grass along the coffee barbers. The coffee barbers, did you remember that? I once wept teenage tears on the velvet lap of my first two lads. And again. She was followed by two policemen called by the barber to check her out. Tabori said one of them, dropping the misses, so to assert authority. Yes. Follow us and don't cause any trouble. Oh. Anything wrong? You're under arrest. What, whatever for? Whatever for. You're being deported. How? My mother asked, implying the absurdity of all arrests and in particular, this one on a sunny day on route to a weekly gin game. Well, what do you expect? So that was the way those days in my hometown, Jews and non-Jews alike, people facing disaster with equanity. There was no place for panic or indignation there, not after so many sunny days of disaster. That's the way it goes. The three of them stood for a moment in the sun, looking away from each other. Klapka and Iglori, the two policemen, were in their 70s, recently recalled from retirement for their fascism. No, no, no, no. Ours, ours. But that's the way. Was an understaffed kind of fascism. Nervous about the fact that there were more Jews, Reds, Liberals, Fagots, and other criminals than policemen. These two should never had been called baggage service. Klapka had asthma and Iglori, the gout. Besides, they had never been any good as policemen. Klapka had bungled several in the heiress and Iglori. Iglori, while beating up a communist girl had broken his thumb and thus became the loving stalker of force. They stood for several seconds without saying a word. Finally, my mother looked around for the police car, but there was none to be seen. Not to be seen. And Iglori, not to mention my mother, were too unimportant to be provided with such luxury. So they escorted her to the tram stop to catch the number six. That would take them to the West station where a train had already been assembled with 20-odd cattle cars to accommodate some 4,000 deputies. There wasn't a cloud in the sky. The weather. The tram was clouded and nobody got off. Nobody got off. The policeman, not knowing how to be both, inconspicuous and assertive, gapped at the woman conductor who was leaning casually against the door. Stand back there, said Klapka, not very loudly. Stand back where? Asked the conductor and did not move. Until my mother looked up at her with her incomparable blue eyes. Him again. The conductor responded by bumping some of the riders with her hips opening a gap and held my mother up. The steps. She creased into the crown, crowded that stood stiffly entwined as if in a vertical masquerade. Vertical masquerade, stiffly in the wind. You think that is good? Don't you like it? No. OK, I cut it out maybe. The Klapka snapping for air could already sense disaster. Iglodi, who had never forgotten the mockery of his colleagues, decided to abandon the instructions about acting inconspicuously, fumbled in his pockets and produced the handcuffs, his credentials as it were, and said after a while, state police. But the conductor had already rung at the bell and the tram began to move. Iglodi, rattling the handcuffs, put a big foot on the moving step and stumbled against the lamppost. The Klapka trotting after the tram stuck out the curved top of his cane. I grabbed hold of the cane. Yeah, you were really never able to resist a tester for help. The tram was gathering speed. Klapka's head flew off. He let go of the cane. And wheezing with asthma called out like an elderly lover. Wait for me at the next stop. Holding high in the detective's cane, my mother turned to look at the crowd for advice. Rigid, blank, shifty, their eyes were turned away, squinting down at the floor or a gapping through her as though she were made of glass. The word state police had condemned her to a sort of leprosy. Drew, no one tried to push her off the tram, but she had become dirty to them or what was worse, invisible. Only the conductor moved, handing her a ticket without waiting for instructors, instructions and said lethargically. Very, very quickly. Naming the last stop. And my mother realized that she had been given free of charge, an invitation to escape. Yeah, instead of waiting for her over the hill prosecutors at the next stop, she was free to ride on and get into hiding. And why actually didn't do so? What? Yeah, go into hiding. But how does one go into hiding at the age of 60 when you're a lady wearing a good black dress with a good black head with wax flowers around the rim and wear in the hills under a bridge, his sister's house where she could easily be tracked down and then danger even more innocent people. Most of the family had already been disfigured or disborded and some like cousin Clara and her diabetic child had already been turned into smoke over Poland. My mother had long since given up asking for help from her Aryan friends. After her husband's arrest, they had become contaminated accomplices to the abomination on Tuesday morning when her husband's arm has been wrenched behind his back, his gold-rimmed spectacles hanging from an ear as they let him out of the bedroom where I was born and kicked him downstairs. Don't worry, was all he had said. A remark both heroic and stupid. That was not all he said. Correct me if I'm wrong. He also said, Elsa. Elsa? No, like a child. Was it embarrassing? Not to me. The woman conductor whistled a popular tune as she shoulders her way through the crowd. My mother stood ticket in one hand, cane in the other, paralyzed by what her husband would call the incompetence of good. He was an adventure that demanded goial and strengths, but my mother had never had an adventure. Now, except for the one with her golden lover. No, no, no, I tell this now, your own fault. As she would call the Cavalier Lieutenant who years before her marriage kissed her after a dance on her eyelids. And on the naan. Pardon me? On the open naan. Naan, naan, naan. All her life, even as a child, she was a mother. Seeing to it- Ah, Jeff, you feel your gladience of innocence. That the apartment was warm, the coffee strong, the meat tender and the boys properly dressed. But these skills were of little use now where she would have had to behave like leaning or better, like Douglas Fairbanks, her idol. The thief of a Baghdad who would spring from roof to roof. And so at the next stop, she said, see you again to the blank staring riders and got off to wait for the detectives under the big clock, the favorite meeting place for her lovers. They arrived on the next tram, certain that I had gone into hiding. That was a wise decision, Klapka said, handcuffing her. Tell me, my mother said, embarrassed by the attention they were getting under the big clock. Where are you actually taking me? To Auschwitz. Where? To the Jewish bakery. Oh. Oh. Under the great glass dome of the West station, Chris crossed by the sort of sunbeams seen in cathedrals. My mother was cast into a hysterical mass ballet whose choreographer, a German officer, was seated incongruously in a plush armchair, reading a book and paying no visible attention to the inefficiency of his servo workers. Greenshirts, policemen, plain clothesmen and railwaymen were going berserk trying to organize the exodus. The deputies snatched out of some less trivial activity like my mother found themselves transferred into a cacophonic nightmare they had been haunted by for some time. A ritual butcher, his cleaver still dripping blood. A group of schoolgirls in shorts and trek shoes snapped from the middle of a gym class and young men in pajamas, his lips rimmed by a tooth crust. Four or five wide eyes patients wearing the peach garb of an insane asin and a rabbi with a buttered roll and no shoes. Having recovered from the first shock they were driving the tormentors crazy by requests that sounded insane because they were so normal. The lawmen rushed up and down the platform and tried to push Chauvin, kick the crowd into a straight line so they could be pressed inside the cattle cars whose sidewalls had already been lowered. Excuse me, sir. May I use the telephone to inform my wife? Forget it. Where could I feel this Thomas bottle with tea? No idea. Have you any ideas, sir? How long it would take us get you there? No. Do you have a pencil, sir? One at a time, you wretz. Would you be kind enough to mail this letter to the chief rabbi of New York? Kiss my ass. Is there a dining car on the street? Not so loud, you dog scant. Might I borrow your hat, sir, so I could pray? Shut up, shut up, shut up! I'm not a Jew. I am not a Jew. That this kinder's wonder of a green shirt actually freaked out screaming on top of the baggage cart, shut up, shut up, shut up, and fired a shot in the air. The German officer who had been unraveling a handkerchief blew his nose, got up, and said, not very loud, quiet down, which went like a wind through the crowd and hushed everyone. A fine lyrical observation, my darling. Are you making fun of me? Not at all. Only, well, I told you a story and now you're telling a story. How can two stories be said the same? So why don't you tell it? No, no. Try it. Even as a child, you would turn things, I mean life into stories. I've always admired you for that. But? But how could a person, especially a child, live his life and on the very same time, turn it into a story? I always admired you for that. I can't tell you my story. What I did remember for your sake, so that you could turn it into a story I've already forgotten. All I can do is to correct you now and again, if that is what you want. Yes. Because you do tend to exaggerate and embellish my darling and only very little of it was as beautiful as you now make sounded. For example, I can't say much about Sunbeams and cathedrals at the West Station. I just stood there quietly looking around for some friends, minding my own business and hoping that good behavior would be favorably noticed and perhaps assured my release. A very foolish hope. If you are a good little girl, everything will turn out all right. That was the golden rule of her life. A rule as realistic as the prayer of the little old man who, for want of a hat, was covering his head with an aged speckled hand. My mother tried to ignore him. What eventually caught her attention with a pen was another train. Two tracks away, about to leave with passengers on vacation. Another more familiar chaos was shaping the scene over there. Overpacked carts followed by suspicious fathers. Car hides. Pulling in their way into crowded compartments, panically, mothers wondering whether they had turned off the gas. Children with sailboats, beachboats and stuffed dolls with parents screaming or slapping them. Car hides. Partir, you see? Partir, c'est mourir un peu. Oh, this was not the only French my mother knows. That's not true. What is it? The Beaujolais primeur est arrivé. But now applause for Elsa Tambouris from Budapest. Yes, she found herself sunk in reveries. Location images of the past came to her mind. And she thought she saw her husband wearing a cocky boating cup, a cigar, a slant in his mouth, trying to cover his incapacity. For travel by bellowing at porters, handling about losing tracks of the luggage immediately leading and leading his family to a carriage reserved for a clergy. She envisioned the two boys in their sailor suits getting lost and found in the nick of time in a first class compartment, swapping fantastic stories of high adventure. She pictured all the long summers by the lake with peeling noses, mosquito-infected suppers in the garden, afternoon promenades, and making love on a sandy sheet. And then from one minute to the other, so it seemed she was inside a cattle car. How time flies, my darling. Squeezed together with some hundred, 200 fellow travelers, her feet slightly of the floor and as the sidewall was hoisted and bolted, shut in darkness, expect for a straight line of sunlight filtering through between two loose planks. What's that? The darkness started moving. The rays of sun between the loose planks lit up a few human parts. As if the deputies had already been dismembered, a hat, a hand, a hooked nose, a pair of wet eyes, fluttering hair, all of it belonging to different people, yet embodied by a single mutilated giant. As the train had settled down to an event trot, and the foul air was freshened up by a country breeze, this very unison breathing changed to a different kind of gasping. Cows and sneezes spread diseases. Someone remarked humorously and was rewarded by a giggle with conjured up the atmosphere of a children's room at night and the children enjoying furtive jokes under the covers while the grown-ups danced above the fairy tale, but no one would be safe from getting baked in the oven, except for this one. Would the lady on whose food I'm happened to be standing give you, reveal her identities, signify displeasure? Ho, ho, ho, take off your hand off my hip, young man, not you, hey, hey, hey. Ach, ich hab sie an Uhr auf die Schulterren geküsst. The kitschy folly of the aria was counterpointed to the prayer of the rubby with no head. Some, God, you are. Well, why are you this morning at 11 when they broke my glasses out of a snack, taking a nap? Well, I'm through with you, boy. Do me a favor and shoot some other people next time. Unwilling to pray, my mother was relaxing, but then the darkness surrounding her began to assume a shape. The fragmented pieces would be observed. Someone to her left smelled of slawwax. Another had wiry hair, a third wall bleached rough linen. The fourth was sweating through his shirt, but were the children. Up to then my mother seemed to stand on the bottom of muddy waters. Another one of those wretched metaphors. Doesn't matter. But now there were buttons, knuckles, earlobes, shins about hair, and then to her astonishment a hand was moving up her good black dress. Now comes what you call the love story. Yes, now comes what I call the love story. Aren't you ashamed of telling it? Yeah, of course I'm ashamed. That's why I'm telling it. But I'm your mother. Yes, you are my mother. But is it or isn't it true that in the darkness of the cattle car, the hand was moving, as I said before, up her good black dress, and stopped shyly before rounding her left breast at the same time. The chin settled on her shoulder and stayed there. She blushed and moved an inch forward, but the hand with its arm cornering her from behind, clasped her breast firmly and pulled her back. There was a body belonging to that hand, leaning humbly against her backside. As she made her last attempt to free herself, the voice whispered into her hair. Please, it will be the last time. The hand released her breast to show its respect, waited and rested on her breast again, two fingers caressing her nipple. Well, such is life. My mother had almost said she said nothing for the hand was pleading in a child manner, asking for her rather than seeking to make request. My mother could not remember when her nipple had been last played with. She was almost 60 then, and sex to her had become an unpleasant chore that she had put aside with other childish things. For a moment, she thought about her husband, languishing in prison. What would he say? They had never discussed just things, he was prude. One time he had ordered a cousin out of the apartment for using the word testicles in front of my mother. The last time he had slept with her was 80 years before, I think in a Corinthians spa on the squeaking mattress of a white hotel set in the middle of fir trees. I say, I think because as a rule, sons have a peculiar romantic idea about their parents' sex life. At least that's what my son tells me. She liked to feel her husband's weight, I think, and the way he called her, my little Elsie, his bald-paid bird into the pillow when he came, I think. She had never had another man in her life, I think, and now in the cattle car, the body belonging to the tender but anonymous hand was pressed against her buttocks seeking entry and release. No one had ever made love to my mother standing from behind, not even her husband, I think. She wasn't quite sure in the cattle car on the way to Auschwitz how it could be done if at all through a good black dress. And yet the two bodies picked up the rolling rhythm of the train and her breath also had quickened. Above his chin, resting on her shoulder, there came appreciative gasps and another plea. It's the last time. So she bent her knees and opened her bony, pine cheeks to a warm spray that stained her good black dress. The little Robbie's prayer had never ceased. After a while, the hand released her breast, the arm and the chin parted from her. Her hair was blessed with a kiss and the body behind her wriggled away. She never found out who her lover was. When they had stopped near the border and the gate to death as the saying went to change to a German cattle train much cleaner than their own, my mother was surprised by the strong rays of the sun. I thought it had already become night. But no, it was still day. And the travelers 4,031 clocked out of their confinement into a lazy afternoon. The train had shifted to a sidetrack next to a golden field. Peasants were loading hay. A horse buggy was kicking up the dust of a lane. No one paid attention to the travelers except for a baffled child behind a bush sucking his thumb. There was no tavern in that landscape. The weather was fine. The work going well, the bird flew from a tree. It would have been a pleasant evening and the doom passengers passed by like characters who had wandered into the round play. True, an invisible dog was barking hysterically. It must have been chained to a post. A metallic clenker accompanied the barking. In that barking, my mother says, could be heard through the rest of the afternoon. Let me go, the dog was saying. I have to put my darling. For a while, nothing happened and no one spoke. Then a young man, squirming if his crotch had been wet, stepped forward to pick up some red poppies and was shot. He fell down and died quickly. Only his fingers moved a bit like a baby groping for a nipple. My mother had never seen a man being shot and the shot was sufficient to restore perfect discipline. The message was clear. No more of the hysteria that had prevailed at the West station. The quiet command was heard from the direction of the engine. The deputies began to walk obediently. Their steps crunching the gravel, passing the same German officer who had been sitting in the plush armchair departure time with his back turned to the travelers. He watched the loading of a hay cart. The green shirts surrounded him puzzled by his interest in the hay. Hurry, hurry. One of them shouted to demonstrate his efficiency. The German put up a gloved hand to hush him as though he was anxious not to disturb the peace of the afternoon. The deputies walked around the engine and crossed the tracks passing the German train. They seemed to be led by no one but themselves and they continued to the country lane which was bordered on both sides by more red poppies until they got to a gray rectangular building with a tall chimney. That building did not blend into the landscape and drew in being a ruin itself, the view. It was abandoned. It was an abandoned brick factory with weeds and goat manure all over broken windows getting down into an open courtyard the size of a football field where the dog chained to a post was barking. This courtyard was like a stage that was set up in the heat of the day by the three green shirts who placed a table and an armchair in the middle, a pile of doskis on the table and a rubber sand. They waited restlessly. One of them threatened the dog and finally kicked it but the dog did not stop barking. Finally, the German officer made his entrance. Was chewing something. He sauntered to the table but did not immediately sit down. His audience was all around peering down through the open window or the factory, the deputies having milled around in the empty storerooms and bakeries past crumbling shelves and ovens were finally drawn to the windows and stayed there staring down in the yard for they knew in their bowels that they would not remain spectators long and would sooner or later have to make their entrance. Yes, there's nothing like stretching a metaphor. That's what you can say. The German sat down and took off his gloves. His hands seemed exceptionally white. He picked up a dossier or one of the green shirts tried to explain something and was hushed. The officer began to read. He was reading. The spectators knew about them. Occasionally, he looked up as if trying to connect a face with a name. But how could one identify a Mrs. Krauss or a Mr. Altschul among 4,000 odd faces with small blotches behind crime and spiderweb? Yet every time he did look up, many felt personally looked at and stepped away from the window. Very perceptive, my darling. It must have been about three in the afternoon. My mother, not easily entertained, began to feel bored and had somewhat of a guilty feeling about being bored. How can one dare to be bored outside the gates of hell? She started to walk around hoping to drum up a gin game or at least a piece of paper so she could kill time by writing an explanatory note to her husband. Curiously, she wasn't worried, which was her custom about being away from home. And now here is a nice little psychological detail, my darling. Yeah, I mean, as a rule, you did not like being away from home. On holiday, for instance, fearing that your world and the people, the objects, the heartaches in it would not survive with your own touch. What on earth would happen in my absence to Cornelius or with Cornelius socks or Clara's bronchitis or the dust on the windowsills? Would you have taken care? I was only 12. Oh, yeah, you were only 12. But her arrest made her victim, so to speak. Freeing her from the obligations of a daily existence. For example, she always felt a little guilty about playing cards in the middle of the day just as she would never allow herself the luxury of a cup of tea or a coffee or even a movie until after she had done her best to save her tiny world from chaos. But now, as she walked around the Crump factory and finally descended to the grounded floor decision that was to save her life, she thought she had the right to enjoy the free volatility of a card game. There were more people downstairs and they stood in crowded rows by the windows watching the yard. She picked her way through them muttering apologies like a late comer in the theater and found herself in what used to be the staff entrance, an empty hallway with nothing in it except for the faded security instructions on the wall. She read them for lack of other entertainment, no smoking, no spitting, no riot until the shadow fell on her and turning around, she bumped into Alfredo Kellerman. Good God, is this misstabbery that I see before? I don't believe my eyes. This Kellerman was one of my father's followers, a prominent member of what was known as Taburi's pity club and like all other members, not only unsuccessful but un-talented as well. What are these no-bundings doing, dropping ashes on your best rock? The sister Martha would quite rightly ask. Out of liberal guilt, my father had always pursued a career of charity. During the course of years, he long passed after the days of his firm belief in Marxism. He collected a bunch of nebulous, nebulous, nebulous. Who's claim for charity lay precisely in their undeserving. No one else had paying attention to these unworthies. And that was sufficient for my father to stick up with them with the impeccable instinct of a professional Samaritan. Once on a Sunday walk, I asked him why he wasted his time on those bumps and he said, only the unloved deserve loving. This Kellerman was the worst of the lot, a fat, light, sliddle, zombie, goo-goo-eyed with a cold cigar rotating in his toothless mouth. His farts were stink before they could be heard. Did you hear them once? Even that. He also passed himself as a hypnotist, do you remember? But could not put anyone into a trance. Not even my son, not a rank mother. And one time he told us he was a black belt carrot master and extended his proof, his iron stomach for a blow. And when you hit him, he fell down like a bowling pin. The moment he recognized my mother, he turned pale out of fright. Mrs. Tabori, God heavens, I don't believe my eyes. What are you doing here? What do you think I'm doing here? Taking your location. But you are not supposed to be here. I know, I'm not supposed to be here. No one's supposed to be here. No, no, no, never mind the others. But you, Mrs. Tabori, the vice of the Cornelius Tabori, what are you doing in these shitty surroundings? Look around yourself. Is this an appropriate belly place for a lady with incomparable blue eyes? It's filthy, it's inhuman. The toilet facilities are appalling. The catering is beyond content. How could you permit yourself to be handled in such manner? How dare they? What has got into them to put the wife of such an eminent humanist into this fixing? How could I permit them? What do you mean, Kelvin? How could I permit them? This is insane. You must go immediately and lodge a complaint. Tell them in no uncertain terms. Inside of being released, insist on being released and returned to your home at once. With a written apology. Now see here, Kelvin. No more excuses. Go out there, into the yard, and tell that German officer, enough is enough. The time is for pussy-footing is over. Your patience is exhausted. Make him crawl and dart. But Kelvin? My mother was getting annoyed at his naivety until she realized that his eyes glimmered with insanity. Using his not-so-ironed-heart stomach, he gave her fast little shoves toward the glass door that opened into the sun. Tell him he healed. The whole thing is a mistake. Tell him to let you go, dear madam, or he'll end up inside by rear. He had already opened the door, pushed her out, closed the door behind her, and leaned against it with all weight to stop her from coming back. That she stood at the edge of the yard, a cruelly long way from the table and the chair in the middle. She could see at the eyes of 4,000 people upon her. She was quite alone in the sun. She had never felt lonelier. So she began to walk in a good black dress and a good black head that walks flowers around the rim and a white gloves, the left thumb mended, clutching her purse with the apple in it. Plums, my love. I've seen a few of acts of courage in that wall. For instance, a petting charm woman trapped in a basement window after the first attack of you two bombers, four stories of brick and mortar crushed her slowly to death. A one free hand, the only thing at first that was free, wiggling through the window as we were trying to dig her out. No hurry, boys. I've been holding up this blooming house all my life. She kept saying, till dawn, and the blooming house finally buckled over and buried her, her free fingers dying, her warm death, or Sergeant Kaufman, unlikely, named for hero who would cross the English Channel twice weekly in order to collect samples of German concrete along the Normandy coast. He was caught and literally skinned alive and yet refused to say a thing to his torches, except for, you're wasting your time, gentlemen. His brave time came after the liberation back in East Rinstead, suffering 77 skin grafts until he looked like a rotten turkey. I'm told that tomorrow, he told me shortly before he died, they will replace my upper lip with a piece of my asshole, something like this shouldn't happen to a master of Hegelian dialectics like me. Those one more of his oblique jokes referring to Mark's desire to turn Hegel upside down. Those two come to my mind now. I've forgotten many others, but I must praise my mother's courage as she walked away from the safety of numbers, separated herself from the anonymity of being one of 4,004 million, 40 million warm bodies. We all have stopped counting the debt, though they make the earth explode. Among them, she had felt safe. She could hang on them in ultimate solidarity, even though they would be led into the fire. But walking toward the table and the chair, three green shirts still hoovering around the German, their backs to her, the dog still barking, the sun still feels. She felt she had left the banality of life and was traipsing dog-footed toward some incredible punishment, which now, by the first time, was as tangible and stinking as the god shit beneath her shoes. 8,060 eyes accompanied her walk and condemned it, she felt. She had abandoned them all by Calamans push and shove and had become a traitor. Anyone who has survived these dead people is a traitor. She felt as if she were naked. And I can see her walking naked across the yard. And this nakedness becomes the measure of her courage. Who has ever seen my mother's nakedness? Not even her husband would prefer to make love in the dark, and as for me, the only time I saw her naked was the time of my birth and down my eyes were closed. She was deep inside the yard when the Germans saw her approaching between the green shirts. Their eyes joined together miraculously. True, my mother felt like ducking and hiding, but the only safe place in the world was in his eyes. Her head felt empty. She had no idea what to say to accuse her of brazenness. The green shirts noticed that the Germans gaze had become stuck in distance. They turned. The smaller of the green shirts was mustache-hung like snot under his nose began to bark. Got him, Zubit, what you think you're doing out here? My mother did not know how to stop. Excuse me, sir, she said to the German. Get back in there! Snot face screamed. Now, just a minute, the German interrupted him, but the green shirt did not know how to stop either. All his life he had wanted to scream at women like my mother and take orders from no one, but all the day he had been taking orders from this German who smelled of lavender and never raised his voice. Now both of them have had enough of each other, and in that tuck in of war, my mother began to sense her salvation. Get out of here, you cunt, or I blow your stinking head off. One moment, please. If anyone's going to scream around here, it's me. She has no business here. Let me decide that. What can I do for you? I'm not supposed to be here. Now, what do you mean you're not supposed to be here? I have a protective passport issued by the Red Cross. That's a good one. What's so funny? If the lady has a valid passport, she shouldn't have been arrested. That's what I mean, sir. May I please see it? Unfortunately, I don't have it with me. It's not fair. Let out a guffaw and sprung triumphantly into the air, slapping his knee like a Hitler caricature. Stop it. But madam, if you do have a passport, you're supposed to have it on you all the time. I know. I'm very sorry about it, but it couldn't be helped. No. What do you mean by it couldn't be helped? Well, it's like this. My husband and I have been issued a single passport. My husband is in jail. Another misunderstanding, but let's not go into that. He has the passport with him. I hardly ever go out. I wouldn't dare not without the passport. But this morning, my sister, Martha, called, she was not feeling well and has been suffering from epilepsy. She asked me to visit her and play a little gin, and I couldn't very well refuse. I mean, who would let her only sister suffer a fit without the comfort of a little gin game which happens to be the only thing that calms her down. But anybody could say that. This lady is not anybody. Nobody is anybody. Everybody is somebody. Okay. Now are you telling the truth? Yes. Do you know what's gonna happen with you if it turns out to be a lie? Yes. Said my mother. Now the entire situation was reduced to these two pairs of eyes and her gaze clouding over with some ancient anguish, tried to signal to him, well, son, what can you do to me? Cut off my breasts. Hang me up for the birds to pluck out my eyes. Burn me alive. What could anyone do to me that would be worse than my naked walk across this yard? All right. Put the lady back on the train and let her return to the city. See that she gets something warm to eat. He could not bear the gratitude and her eyes. So he turned away quickly. Yes. That's right. Next to the engine of the cattle train, there stood an ordinary train. She was put into a first class compartment. The moment she was left alone, her legs began to tremble and she wet her panties. But she wet her panties, but did not dare to go to the toilet. She leaned her head against the lace, dolly discovering the back of the red plush seat. Facing her was a photography of a span. She looked at the white hotel in the sea of fir trees. Well, that sort of life is also possible. She thought remembering a last night or of love on the squeaking mattress. Does anyone have the right to make love in a white hotel while dogs are chained to a post? He's got damn juice. Like my mother, never stop moralizing. 10 years later, under the almond tree in a London backyard, she began to write all of this down on paper. Her spelling was never any good. I had always thought of her as lovable, but somewhat simple. Yet she proved capable of thoughts like these. Once you have been to hell. Once you have been to hell. And it is always around the corner, this place of nakedness, where you are at the mercy of others. Well, in this hell, you don't give a damn about hair curlers and wet panties and reconciliation with the enemy. All my life, I thought I enjoyed reconciliation, especially with the nasties of my enemies. I never had many, hardly any, who would bother or hate or hurt me. But I constantly dreamed of shaking hands with or hugging someone I despised. Well, to hell with all that. Beware of looking at the enemy in the eyes my darling honor might stop hating him and thus betray the date. I am now a bad little girl. Earlier I had been a good little girl, always helping those in need. For instance, my father was kicked out of Israel and other city resorts, although he was an excellent father and physician. He could not have seducing his female patients even as they lay like chicken on his examination table. Now I might help my father by cutting his toenails and that German officer with the two blue eyes behaved like a father to me or a son, no difference. Yet I hate him for having to love him, which I do. After all, he and his brothers burnt my corneillos and my mother and 80 others of my blood and flesh. I can never forget them. May God strike me dead if I do. And the next time around, oh, I hope I'll be dead by then and out of this confusion of hearts. But the next time around, I will smash their German faces with a hammer. I'm a weak and stupid woman, afraid of slight aches who wanted to be nice to everybody. My darling, beware of weak and stupid women. Once they lose their dread of hair curlers or slight aches for their need to be nice, they become holy monsters sitting in that first class compartment in my wet panties. I wished I had been a wage. Oh, dear, where do these thoughts come from? The door of the compartment was wrenched open and another enemy came in. The German soldier, very young, why were they sending these children to the wars? And he brought my mother cabbage soup and a piece of gray bread. He sat down in the corner by the door and watched her eating. Chopped up bits of sausage was swimming in the grease. German cooking. My mother thought, laddling the room. She wasn't half finished when she saw the other cattle train starting off to Auschwitz. She could not see any of the deputies, but she knew they were there, all the children. And she looked away in guilt, silently saying farewell to them, adding crazy little admonitions as if it's a mother. Take care of yourselves, all right? Get enough sleep and fresh air and don't drink water from the tap. Eat slowly and don't forget to write, children. Even if it's only a postcard. Tell a dead child to write a postcard. She was nuts at that moment, absolutely nuts. And her tears came like her urine filled, her incomparable blue eyes made her blind before rolling into the German soup. That goddamn Jewish sentimentality. Instead of staying cool and factual as befits a lady, she thought of the 4,030 would be dead and sprayed her juice all over that clean German compartment in grief over her so-called children. But what's the use of grief? Who is ever held by grief except the whalemakers? But I tell you, who is held by it, the murderers. That's who, for let me tell you, my darling, murder begins where grief has ceased to wet your pants or your eyes. Don't you like the soup? Oh, yes, yes, I do. Yet she ganked on it and dust off. When she awoke, she saw a savior sitting in the opposite seat, polishing a plum, one of hers. Forgive me, going through your purse. I was hungry. Be my guest. Did you see the cabbage soup had some kind of sausage in it or didn't you notice? I'm a vegetarian and we used to have it. Odd thing, but the thing of eating the flesh of death repulses me. I don't say so. Started in Hamburg after Firestone, do you know Hamburg? No, no. I was in a restaurant and a chopped steak was served to me, rather artfully arranged when suddenly I could see what it really was. A piece of a calf that once had raised in a field and the calves seemed to be looking at me. Now, how can anyone stoop so low, I said to myself, as to butcher a calf, chop it up and eat it? Well, what's one that's one way of looking at it? Of course, one ought to go even further. Does a plum feel pain as it choose it? I don't think so. You're very kind, but I've read somewhere that if you pluck a lily, she would. If she had a voice, let out a scream. Sometimes I think I can hear all the lilies in the field screaming and the cabbages too. How far does one have to go to be one of the righteous before God? A lot. There was a priest in the village I come from, a rather unsuccessful one. His congregation kept wandering and certain Sundays that were hardly more than five people lounging in the pools, bored to tears with his sermons. Well, he could comfort himself at nights when he could not sleep. Jesus laughs the losers. He himself was a loser as befits the God. The message of God is an outcry against vanity and success. All religion is grounded in failure or let us say since failure belongs to life, it must be sanctified. What I like about Christianity and Judaism, of course, as well, is that they are so realistic. They allow for failure. That is, they tolerate sin. They accept the weakness of man, the sweat of fear, for instance, in a garden before an arrest. What else have we got but our weakness? We can't even follow any of the famous commandments and they really are not so hard to follow, are they? I mean, what is so difficult about resisting the temptation to murder, don't you think so? Oh, yes. Well, then one day the plant tastes really good. Something nasty happened in the village. The local draper, a Jew, was caught not by thugs, but precisely by those five faithful who still attended the services and was beaten to death with alpine walking sticks. They buried him hastily on the sewage farm. Only his widow was allowed to attend, but his grave was open, found the following Saturday and the body gone. The same night the priest's chimney was belching smoke. A remarkable thing for his housekeeper was known to be away and the priest who had very wide hands could not cook. The man was incapable of menial tasks. On that Sunday, Maria's ascension, the church was reasonably full. A dozen little girls were receiving their confirmation. There were wide lays, but it wasn't wide for long. As soon as they had received his body and his blood, they began to throw up over there themselves, vomiting not bread and wine, but what had been served to them, namely real chunks of flesh and real blood and instead of a sermon celebrating transubstantiation, the priest yielded the congregation. If you want to eat God, then by God, I'll make you eat his flesh and drink his blood. The real thing, the real thing, the real thing. Horrible story, isn't it? Yes. When we are arrived, I'll have to turn you over to the local police so they can check out your passport and you'll be deported again. And I don't believe I can save you more than once. Meanwhile, however, I must go to the toilet. Good luck. Plums never fail, as St. Paul might say. The ways things are, I'll be staying on the toilet for quite a while. Is that so? If I'm not black before we get there, make yourself scarce. Jesus resides in my bowls, if you pardon the expression. She never saw him again. Though she waited a full five minutes after the train had come to stop at the West station, no one paid attention to her. So she took a tram to assist the mother. Where have you been, assist to cry out? Instead of replying, my mother asked for a cup of coffee. Need stay in the club, God damn it. Uncle Julius bellowed from his bed and came into the living room wearing striped pajamas. He was card crazy and choleric too. What the hell do you mean by turning up so late? Had I known I would have asked Samo Österischer to play instead of you? My mother had already sat down, taking off her good black hat. The one with spax flowers on the rim for the first time that day. The sister asked again, where have you been all day? Well, this I will tell you. The hell you will. I had enough of stories from you and your crazy son, George, who swindled his way into London where he now sits telling lies over the BBC in battering virgins. No, no, no, something happened to her, said the sister. But Uncle Julius, not partial to the tragic sense in life, was already at the table, wiping off crumbs, cutting a cigarette in half, putting the stuff into his holder and lightning it. My mother stared at him, stared at the smoke, coffee cup, the lace tablecloth, all those manner things that decorate hell. My son exaggerates from time to time, but he doesn't lie. Shut up and start dealing. They played gin for a couple of hours. By midnight, when they paused for a cold supper with tea, my mother had won 35 pengars. She had every reason to be pleased. Well, can you both hear me? Yes. That was a truly wonderful, wonderful, wonderful reading. Thank you, thank you both for being with us and giving us this exceptional rendering. I'm very moved just listening to it again and it has truly an extraordinary achievement. Thomas, thank you so much for arranging the text. The translation of George Tarborough's My Mother's Courage was adapted by you for two actors. The great Jack Asypes translated it, who has only been in contact, he couldn't be with us. So thank you so much for doing this again. We would like to thank our partners, the Stadziata Castle, the National Jewish Theater Foundation, the Holocaust Theater International Initiative, both Arnold Mittleman and Elvin Goldfarb and Tony Torn from Torn Space, where we hopefully will show this work and everybody at least in New York City can come. It's going to be a very small reading, with very limited 15 viewers in a room. It is truly an extraordinary work, so really thank you for creating this for us. I think as far as I know, it's the only reading of Tarborough's My Mother's Courage here on Planet Earth, on Holocaust Day, and we really would like to thank also Seguin, Schneider, Kettner, both of you. As far as I know, it's the first time with Zoom reading, first time in another English language. It was remarkable. It was beautiful. It was true. So really, really, both of you, thank you for going on that adventure with us. We're going to now morph into a smaller discussion afterwards. And we have with us Martin Cargely, a professor of Germanic and Slavic studies at the University of Georgia, a Tabori specialist he published about and who will enter, and I hope Andy will be able to mention it again. Thank you so, so, so much for Cargely joining us. And I hope that we are going to be able to have a small discussion. So, Martin, before we come to you, Thomas, how was it performing the text in English? Segeron wants to say something first. I only want to say thank you. Have a shalom. Good bye. Thank you. Thank you. Bye-bye. Segeron, thank you. Well, it was quite a work. The two of us played this together. Maybe your people should know that for 26 years at several theaters all over Germany in a scenic version. But this was the first time we did it in a foreign language and to do something in a foreign language even if it's only a reading is sort of insecure ground. So we are very happy we got over it. That's fantastic. And I know you flew around also in Spain to an island to meet Segeron with all the corona things that are happening. Thomas, you were the Intendant of Star Ziata Castle for over 15, 16 years. We had opera ballet, drama. Why did you choose this Tabori play to perform yourself, your trained actor? Why did you choose the Tabori play? And why did you perform it for over two decades? Well, I could give a very long answer. In my family history, the Jewish history laid a big part and I'm also a very big friend of what we call the Jewish humor. I think these people needed more than any other people in the world after what happened to them through history. And a certain sort of humor is sort of, I think Segeron Freud said, every joke is an epitaph to a died feeling. Okay, so with a certain sort of humor, you can get over things better to put it simple. And what I like very much about this true story is that a little bit like a Tronian horse, there's told a lot about 4,031 people going in a train to Auschwitz and only one survives. But by telling her story, you still tell the story of the other 4,030. And I think that's an intelligent thing. We also, what we liked is that when we do it on stage, actually it starts like a solo reading by me and then the mother appears like a do-book. Like in Jewish stories, the story gets strong and sometimes figures come back to life as coming and disturbing them all the time. It says, come on, it was totally different. I mean, you know, the two people tell the same story. It's never the same story. And the interesting thing is that relationship between the son and the mother remains. When we did it the first time, my 25-year-old daughter wasn't born and I was 40. Now I'm 266 and Segeron got a little older also. But the relation between son and mother always remains. And that's why I think it still works that we can do it and it's a great pleasure for us to do it. And we are looking, by the way, very much forward. It works out to do the scenic version in New York. But I don't want to talk too much now. You heard my voice already. Thank you. Thank you again, Thomas. Martin, thank you so much for joining us. I know you are in transit. You are actually flying. You're in an airport. But you said this is important. I would like to participate. So Martin, you looked professionally in your work as a literary scholar, as a professor of literature, but also theater at the work of Tabori. Why is he important? Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me to participate, Frank. And I just caught the very end of the performance and I also thought it was quite moving and I want to commend the performers. This text, I think, stands out among Tabori's texts for many reasons. I can speak to that later. But why is Tabori's work important? I think Tabori is the most consequential person in the development of epic theater in the context of the Holocaust. So Tabori is well known as a playwright and focused not exclusively, but primarily on the Holocaust. And I think he's indebted to Brecht in many ways. I mean, over the course of his career, you can see there's an engagement with Brecht and techniques. I think when he emerged in Germany in 1969 with the performance of the cannibals, die Kanibane, a theater at the Werkstatt, he offered kind of a third way between two other ways that happened. He proposed in theater, one of which was kind of theatrical realism, like the Deputy der Stilvertreter, the other one was documentary theater. So Peter Weiss' investigation. What Tabori was trying to do was turn the theater into a place of commemoration and engagement at the same time. And I think that was, you know, he found a way in a non-representational way to engage audiences with the victims of the Holocaust to create a moment of empathy without trivializing the experience. And that was very complicated, but he was very successful with it. And in this play, or this text, I should say, because it exists in four different forms, you know, as a film, as a radio play, as a theater play, and as a prose text originally, as a novella. In this play, he also, you know, there are many Brechtian techniques at work. One of the most obvious is that the story is narrated by the son and then the action in part played out or re-enacted by the two participants. So the last line, or one of the last lines, my son exaggerates occasionally, but he's not a liar. That's that kind of form of mediation. Yeah, it is truly extraordinary work, highly theatrical. And I think Thomas is right. He is in his back of his mind and looking over his shoulder. Thomas, what comes to your mind when you hear about George Thaborian performing it in German towns? You played it for a long time. What were the reactions of the audience? That's always weird to say that yourself, but the reactions were very good because obviously Thabori found a form and to tell the story in a way that you are not sort of overwhelmed by guilt, but that you can be touched and that the story reaches you. I mean, a lot of people then get the information also that it is the true story of the mother. She really wrote it down a little bit like a diary at first and then suddenly made this first Prosa version. Thabori wrote a lot of plays. I mean, he wrote a famous play called Mein Kampf, which is my struggle after the book, which shows that him as an unsuccessful artist in Vienna where they didn't accept him at the art school, the world history would probably gone different if they would have taken him at the art school and he's held by a Jew in an asylum who takes care of him and looks for him. It's a very strange construction. If you know later what then happened. Actually, people liked it. We also did it often for younger people or people from the age of 15 on. Now we had it for the first time in one performance for younger people that this question came. Isn't this scene in the in the cattle car not a raping and shouldn't this, is this sort of still politically correct to tell this? But I think we can explain in a very good way why it is and Ziko is very good in those discussions then also. And there is this is this near thing between that and erotic as we all know. So I think even this is correct by the way when we do it on stage, she's not seen. It's totally dark on the stage and there's only one little shine of the sun over her eyes. That's all and I tell it through a mic like you only hear it. But the experience is good. I remember a great New York theater artist, John Jesseron, who said so partly from the Jewish family, he said when he was in Germany, so many people read books and knew about it, but nobody really wanted to go to Auschwitz and see it. And I think this play does. If I may quote an Israeli psychoanalyst, I think he said a very intelligent thing. He said of course the Germans will never forgive us Auschwitz because you don't want to feel guilty. Yeah, it's true. So this is also important to remember and also to engage. Martin, what role do you think can theater play and is that approach successful? I know that you also, you know, surveyed novels or poems or others, you know, what do you see the role of this theater in remembering also on such a day like today? Well, sorry about the background. Well, maybe I just briefly a comment to what you just discussed. So I think, you know, female sexuality is very central both to Tabor's work and to the play. And it appears, you know, when you look at the narrative closely or the dramatic action, like the dialogue, you can see that like motifs that hint at eroticism or love relationship appear throughout the text. You know, when she's picked up by the Hungarian police, for instance, you know, Tabor writes it was at the space where young lovers, the place where young lovers normally met for instance, you know, and the plums that are discussed in the pie and in the prose section are a symbol of female sexuality, actually, of female genitals. And also the name of Kourash, it's from Pommelshausen where it refers to the female genitals as well. So the scene in the cattle car is offensive in maybe perhaps in some people's eyes, but it's very central to the character of the mother. It has to be there. And it fits also very well with Tabor's aesthetics, which is as, you know, Tabor talked of his theater frequently as a theater of embarrassment, like a theater of peinlichkeit. Peinlich meaning both embarrassing but also painful. And I think he wants to create this discomfort among the audience, spectatorship through scenes like that, because we don't want to be too comfortable with that kind of story. And the moments of transgression are very important. So this said, well, what is the role of theater in commemoration? I think what Tabor thought the role of theater was important significance of theater was that it created a space, a ritual space where audience and performers would come together in an act of commemoration and engagement with important questions such as the ones posed by the Holocaust. And I think he believed very much in kind of the fleeting art form, which is like that actually things happen in that moment in the theater because what happens in an evening at the theater cannot be reproduced because every evening is different when you attend the performance. And creating these like, you know, moments of transformation or transformational form of engagement, this is what theater can deliver up to this day. And so it's a different form than, you know, different art form than watching movie, obviously, or reading a book. I think Tabor was interested very much in a kind of therapeutic form of theater that had actually impact on the audiences that participated. And I mentioned Brecht before, I think he used Brecht to create very transformative moments. I mean, Thomas mentioned Mein Kampf, for example, the play, I mean, in the original performance in Vienna, Tabor himself played Lobkowitz, the cook who believes he's got, and in the final scene, he scrubs the floor with toothbrush. And as you know, Vienna, when the Nazis came to Vienna, they made Jews scrub the pavement, clean the pavement, and Tabor kind of reenacts that moment. But in a, obviously, completely futile form. And it's moments like those, like, I mean, there are many like this that he creates that happen at that time in the theater that transform the audience. And I think that, you know, was actually what he believed was the unique role that theater could play in, you know, among the art forms that are available. Yeah, yeah, it is quite, quite shocking, when one really thinks this was all reality, the sun was shining, you know, it was normal day, banal things, as he said in the textbook on the table, and older I get more horrified, I am learning more and more about it. It's the contrary of what I might think. Thomas, you're sort of coming to an end, but what was for you the challenge to do it in English? What about translation, about engaging, speaking? How was the experience for you as an actor to represent George? As I said, it was a tough work, even if it was only a reading, because as an actor, language is very important for you, and I'm an actor since 45 years in German and in English, but it was a very good experience. It was in a way, that sounds a little bit illusory, it was a very good English lesson for me also to do this work. I just want to point out maybe two more things. I think Tabori was very intelligent in, I think what we don't really go through, what experience we don't really go through, we have to repeat and repeat again. And he helps us to go through things in a playful way, in a humorous way. And I want to tell maybe for the end of the story that impressed me very a lot, and I found it very funny from Tabori. He once told in a German TV interview that when he was in his 40s in Los Angeles and he was good friend with Madeline Dietrich, whatever, he started to make a psychoanalysis because everybody made a psychoanalysis in these circles at that time. And he told the psychoanalysis, the theme of psychoanalysis, a lot of dreams. And after a year, and she interpreted the dreams of course, and after a year, he confessed to the lady that, I said, I must say now, that I didn't dream all those dreams, I only, they're all literature. Yeah, I only, it was a fantasy. And then the psychoanalysis said, well, Mr. Tabori, if you think it doesn't tell much about you, what you sort of fantasize, that's your problem. And then he said, and that was the moment where I started to trust the therapy. Yeah. So what you make up actually is in a way a real thing. And in a way, this fairy tale of what he tells, which is the, as you pointed out, the exact opposite of what really happened, but it helps us to digest, to understand. And I forgot one more thing, if I mentioned that, because you talked about the banality also, that he is so honest, that he's saying my mother was bored when they were waiting for the next train, okay? At the gate of hell, she was bored and wanted to play cards or whatever. I mean, you all remember what, how Anna Arendt was attacked when she wrote the book, The Banality of Evil. But sometimes even horrible things are very banal. And we got to face that. And I think this play helps that. Yeah. And the book finally, I mean, showed that it was right, but you remember that she was under huge attacks from a lot of, from the Jewish community at the beginning. Yeah. She wrote this book about... To defend herself. Again, yeah, it is remarkable. I think also we should point out Taburi was well known in the American theater, also on Broadway here. He did Brecht on Brecht. He did the compilation of Brecht poems, of excerpts from his plays, kind of collaged, assemblage with his famous interview with the committee for anti-American activities where he then left overnight the next day. So he had big influence. Bob Dylan came to that show and it said it was so important to his work. Nina Simone rewrote the Pirate Jenny song. And so it was a big influence. And we also got in contact with Annette Feinberg in Heidelberg in Germany, Martin, as well as many others. Is there a renaissance on the horizon of the work of Taburi? Martin, do you think is their interest increasingly now dying to some time ago? Or do you feel he is still overlooked? I think there's a lot of interest in Taburi's work worldwide, the kind of resurgent interest. I mean, Taburi was not a playwright like Brecht, who left behind a theory of former theater that others could adopt. He was very eclectic in his approach to theater. He used whatever was useful to him. So it's very difficult to follow in his footsteps because he's a very unique persona and he didn't have an entirely distinct style. So the sad, I think, you know, people are very interested in his aesthetics because they connect very strongly to kind of performance aesthetics of the 1960s in the United States, which were his former years theatrically and, you know, fall well within kind of the realm of, you know, what is termed post-traumatic theater. So I think he has a lot to offer. It's just, you know, his place. His work is very centered in the time that it is, in the spaces that it is performed in. And so that kind of hinders the reception a little bit, but I think in the U.S. again, I feel people are very interested in his work. I mean, I can, if you allow me to put in a plug in for a collection of essays that I just co-edited with my colleague David Salas, that's coming out with Michigan University Press in February, so in about two weeks. And people who reviewed the essays were extremely enthusiastic about the work and are very interested in learning more about it. So I think there's a significant Tabori reception in Israel as well, so his plays are performed there as well. So I think in, you know, in the realm of Holocaust theater, he is a very important playwright and performer. Yeah, yeah, he really, really is. And my hobby will be able to see, I think there's never been performed, I think in New York City, as far as we know, and I'm sad about Tom's job, but he said the mystery of a play, you just cover when you do it, when you rehearse it and then you show it. It's not really in the text. It's also not fully in the reading. And it's an amazing job. It's just stunning what we heard, but I hope we will be able to also, you know, see that what it cannot be explained under, so a transmit that perhaps will emerge in a performance, you know, between two actors in a space, also in a small space. So I think we've come to an end. Thank you all for participating, especially of course, Martin for taking the time out. Dan Thomas and Sigron, it was a brilliant rehearsal. And I think also, you know, voices from Europe, who reminds us of what is important, of what is significant, what we have to be afraid of. It's a great warning. It happened overnight. As Tabor in the play said, you know, she said, didn't I know you, I knew my friend and he says, no, I don't want to talk to her anymore. Things shift fast. And I think we are in a moment worldwide globally, where things are shifting and we hope and we hope that this was a contribution, that things move in the wrong direction and not in the small one, a small homoepathic pill again. Thanks to everybody involved, the National Jewish Theater Foundation, Holocaust Center, Holocaust Theater International Initiative, Synagogues Center, Feldsburg with Christopher Willing, Lily Ackerman, who also helped us to go and polish the text of it. And Jake Sypes, Jack Sypes who really said, go ahead, use my text. Adapt however you want. I'm thrilled that it will be happening. So thanks to Hal Round for hosting us again. I think this is a very important day to remember all these millions and millions of lives lost and we truly cannot really comprehend and imagine this unspeakable horror, the world witnessed, but this is at least an idea, an idea of how to think about and how to approach it. And I do think that the grasp to be gripe in the German say to kind of put your hands around something that's and not cannot be really truly understood. So thank you all. Thanks to our listeners. Thank you for listening in. We know how many readings now there are online. We have stayed away for a year and a half or two. This is our very first one, but we thought on this day, we should make that a contribution. Martin again. Thank you, Thomas, Siko and everybody and Andy Lerner for doing this here behind the scenes of putting it together, BJ and Thea at Hal Round and everybody at the Stadziata Castle who helped to put this together. Goodbye. Thank you. And I hope you will follow us here at the Segal Center and perhaps look out for the Torn Page, Tony Torn. Also thank you for him who offered to host this production. We hope that Corona Omicon will help will allow us to present it to an interested audience here in New York.