ojemba productions

CAST VISIT TO POLAND - 2005. Walking in the steps of Janusz Korczak.

In preparation for the production, we took 34 of the older members of the cast to Poland at Easter. The object was to research the Holocaust, and visit Warsaw, the city of Janusz Korczak.

We spent two days at Auschwitz, taking part in an extensive study programme looking at life and death within Auschwitz I as well as its sister camp – Auschitz-Birkenau, the site of the largest cemetery in the world, and the centre of the world’s attention in January this year, when the 60th anniversary of the Holocaust was remembered. We were lucky enough to meet Mr. Smollen, the only prisoner to have survived the whole period of time at Auschwitz, and now recognised internationally as the leading expert on the Holocaust.

It was then time to visit Krakow, the city of Oskar Schindler, where were able to visit the site of the Ghetto, and see some of the remains left behind, including a section of the wall.

After Krakow, it was on to Warsaw, and the most emotional part of the trip. The highlight of the week was unanimously the visit to Krochmala Steet and Dom Sierot, the original orphanage run by Janusz Korczak. As the young cast entered the permanent exhibition to Korczak in the main Aula of the home, a blanket of silence enveloped them as they studied photographs, eye-witness accounts and documents relating to the great man, and the reality and enormity of the story they were telling, began to sink in. That evening we were able to return to the Orphanage and throw a party for the children who live there today.

Having visited the Umschlagplatz, where the children were loaded onto the Death Trains, and where the cast were able to find the names of their characters engraved in the wall, we made the final pilgrimage to the site of Treblinka. In the most beautiful setting, a clearing in a pine forest, nothing is left of the horror, save for the memorial made of some 17,000 rocks, symbolising the number of people the Nazis were able to kill each day. Each one bears the name of a Jewish community or village or town, ‘evacuated’ by the Nazis. Only one carries the name of a person, and that name is JANUSZ KORCZAK AND THE CHILDEN. Gathered together, we read from his writings, the account of the final march through the streets of the Ghetto, sang from the musical, and joined our spirits to the words of a prayer for the dead, chanted in Hebrew. As the ceremony drew to a close, each one placed a small stone they had brought with them from England, onto the memorial stone, and a solitary butterfly fluttered around us. The youngsters found some space and sat around for some 20 minutes, each with their own thoughts. In silence we wandered back to the bus, with a sense of having complete our journey, and an awareness of the enormity of the one we were about to embark on – the production of KORCZAK, the musical. By Jonathan Salt.

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