I visited Auschwitz 27 years ago. I'd met a pair of Dutch guys on the train and we'd bought some beers off the guard and we'd had plenty of laughs about staging The Olympics like Miss World, with events run in national costume and then swimwear. We were more sombre once we passed under the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign and soon the words dried up completely. Before the end of the official tour, we sat on a set of steps for a while under a cloudless sky, before - still wordless - one of us upped and walked back towards the railway station and the other two followed. The words returned once we passed again under the sign.
The Holocaust can do that - and a lot more. Its scale, its depravity, its thoroughgoing, relentless cruelty can overwhelm language and, thus, consciousness. Not the least of the triumphs of
The Pianist of Willesden Lane (at
St James Theatre until 27 February) is the centrality of music to its story, a glorious flowering of German culture that was to be so perverted after the fall of the Weimar Republic. In an evening full of light and dark, the music reminds us that joy persisted (and persists), even in such miserable circumstances.
Mona Golabek tells us the story of her mother, Lisa Jura. A girl possessed of a burgeoning musical talent, at 14 she is sent on the Kindertransport train from Vienna to London where, separated from her parents and sisters, she fetches up at a crowded house in North London and ultimately goes on to The Royal Academy of Music and the United States. There's lots of teen girl stuff of course - the crushes, the propositions, the eventual marriage - but there's the dull ache of loss too, as Lisa and her distant family do what they can to survive and to connect.
And then there's the music. Trained by Lisa and a concert pianist in her own right, she caresses and hammers as grand a grand piano as I have ever seen, playing the music that her mother did, whenever and wherever she could clinging on to her Vienna life of Shabbat suppers and Steinway scores. And the music, like the photos we see of her family projected behind her, is sublime, the counter, were one needed, to the nihilist Nazis who would have thrown Lisa to the death camps the moment she set foot again in her homeland.
It's wonderfully performed, searingly personal, but never sentimental. The tears of sorrow I felt pricking my eyes as we saw children wrenched from parents, were matched an hour later by tears of happiness, as the story ends, if not happily ever after, at least with something remarkable - not the least of which is the pianist herself, a living rebuke to the poisonous descriptor "Untermensch", standing before us, alive and accepting the crashing applause of an audience whose gratitude was not just being expressed towards her and her marvellous show, but all those frightened children who got through it and the brave and decent men and women who helped them.
And here come those tears again...
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