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The Stage / A play more important than itself By Michael Handelzalts Hillel Mittelpunkt's new play, "Anda," at Beit Lessin, culminates in the playing of a historic recording of the first words in the speech by the prosecutor in the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Gideon Hausner: "When I stand before you, oh judges of Israel, to lead the prosecution of Adolf Eichmann, I do not stand alone. With me here are 6 million accusers. But they cannot rise to their feet and point their finger at the man in the dock with the cry 'J'accuse!' on their lips. For they are now only ashes - ashes piled high on the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka and strewn in the forests of Poland. Their graves are scattered throughout Europe. Their blood cries out, but their voice is stilled. Therefore, will I be their spokesman. In their name will I unfold this terrible indictment." The external wrapping of the plot of this play is the matter of choosing witnesses for the prosecution (the defense was not able to summon defense witnesses; the state refused to grant them immunity, as the play emphasizes). According to what is depicted, under pressure from the Prime Minister's Office and in the shadow of the Israel Kasztner trial, which evolved from a libel case into an indictment of the Yishuv (pre-state Jewish community in Palestine), and especially of Mapai, a precursor of today's Labor Party, for not having taken sufficient action to save the Jews of Europe, the witnesses were chosen not only on the basis of their testimony but also on the basis of their political and nationalist affiliation. Advertisement In the play, its heroine, Anda, was not chosen to testify; she is a native of Hungary, who for a certain period had been a member of Herut, the major precursor of today's Likud, and had demonstrated against the reparations agreement with West Germany, but wanted to testify in the trial about medical experiments that had been performed on her and other women at Auschwitz. Following the playing of the Hausner tape, a caption is screened: "One hundred and 10 witnesses appeared on behalf of the prosecution during the Eichmann trial. Anda Freund was not among them." She picks up her suitcase and exits through a door in the back wall, which is built of stacks of books, disappearing from her story, from our story. Not all of the witnesses, says the play, did not testify because they were no longer alive. There were also those whose voices were silenced. The second protagonist in the play, Nochi Carmi of the prosecution, is the boy Nahumeleh Weinstock, who survived the Holocaust and made efforts to become an "Israeli" and who struggles to have Anda be allowed to testify and to have the witnesses chosen on the basis of pertinent considerations only. He protests the irrelevant and political intervention in the work of the prosecution and charges that in this way the trial will become a theater piece and a show trial. Before the performance, protests were heard to the effect that the play distorted history, and in the intermission an excited spectator even came up to me and asked if I knew whether the play is based on a true story. I replied that to the best of my knowledge, from reading, before the trial a careful selection of witnesses took place. At first it was difficult to find witnesses, as Holocaust survivors - to whom, over a 15-year period, no one in the Land of Israel and subsequently in the State of Israel wanted to listen - were in no hurry to testify. Then there was a change and there were very many witnesses, and it was necessary to choose from among them those whose testimony would serve the prosecution and not overshadow the main thrust of the trial (for example, those who had been forced to become Kapos were not asked to testify). Moreover, and this has been documented, in Israel, the story of the slaughter of the Jews of Europe had been given political emphases that underlined heroism and not suffering, focusing on one ideological stream and underplaying the other. The Kasztner trial and its reversals had certainly made their mark on the political establishment. In a certain sense, the Eichmann trial was indeed a political trial and a show trial, but there are cases (and the Nuremberg trials are in this category, as will be, apparently, most of the trials at the International Court of Justice in The Hague) in which a political trial and a show trial are also trials in which justice is done, most especially when the crime goes beyond the kinds of crimes with which criminal law is able to deal. The best answer to those who have been protesting the play, as well as to the characters who struggle in the play, was given by the veteran prosecutor Schneour the Mapainik (in an excellent performance by Ilan Dar), in a monologue that Mittelpunkt gives him: "What is important? I? You? That vermin Pecker? Even Eichmann himself isn't important to this trial! [...] The people, the witnesses, the stories from there, only this is important [...] This trial will begin, and witnesses, scores of witnesses, will stand up and tell: This is how we were tortured, this is how we had losses and this is how we were starved and we survived and we remained silent because we were ashamed of our lives, and because until now you left us outside of your world. Your story will be told in the news broadcasts in this country and abroad, on the radio, it will fill newspapers for weeks and days on end ... a wall of silence will perhaps crack all of a sudden. People, people who are living among us like shadows will perhaps once again live like human beings. Think about it, maybe altogether there will be the start here in this country ... of a new spirit, a spirit of ... of listening, of compassion. You know what? Maybe even of generosity [...] Is this not important? [...] I believe that this trial is more important than itself, yes." In this Schneour-Mittelpunkt is right, and David Ben-Gurion was right as well, that this was one of the political aims in holding the trial (apart from the important aim, fundamental in itself, of bringing Adolf Eichmann, implementer of the Final Solution, to justice). The wall of silence was cracked, even if the land did not fill with a spirit of listening, compassion or generosity. Schneour speaks in the name of "the people," even if this is at the expense of the specific suffering of the individuals who are the protagonists of this play. All of this leads to the argument that should already have been common among theatergoers, and should have long ago eradicated accusations that art distorts reality, as it was formulated about 2,500 years ago by Aristotle, in Chapter 9 of "The Poetics": "It is, moreover, evident from what has been said, that it is not the function of the poet to relate what has happened, but what may happen - what is possible according to the law of probability or necessity." The external wrapping of the plot, which raises the debate above, blurs the core of the play that is located at the historic moment when the plot occurs. Mittelpunkt writes about one of the most crucial issues of our life here (in addition to our relations with the Palestinians and the Arabs who live inside the pre-1967 boundaries of Israel): the bleeding wound in the connection between the Jews we were there, especially (but not only) in Europe before and during World War II, and the Israelis we are trying to be here. This connection, between here and there, this wound on which the state of Israel was established, exists for us all, even those of us who have no historical or familial connection to the slaughter of the Jews of Europe. This is the painful heart of the play, and it is represented by two characters who are on this seam line. One is Nochi, the young prosecutor who has tried to blot out the Diaspora child he was and become an Israeli like everyone else, and has struggled for the wholeness of his psyche, when suddenly, in his adulthood, his father the tailor arrived from "there" and established a private Yad Vashem in his home. The relations between the son and the father are very complex; Mittelpunkt writes them with great sensitivity, and there is a special measure of magic in the fact that the roles of the father and the son are played by a father and his son in real life. Avraham Selektar, the father, is warm, grumbling and loving (and also a tailor, who hems a skirt for Alona, Nochi's very Israeli girlfriend), and Micha Selektar, his son, is very Israeli, rough-edged, energetic, impulsive, sharp, but also someone who knows how to reveal his vulnerability, anxiety, distress and embarrassment. The second character, for whom the play is named, and rightly so, is the young woman who went through the inferno of Auschwitz and afterward rebuilt her life in this country, at the edge of a mental hospital; she has come here because she made friends with a certain woman at Auschwitz and has taken responsibility for her life. When she came to this country (these things are said in 1960, but are deserving of being said today as well), she realized that "I don't have a political party and I don't have a country and I don't have a language because you have no idea what a concentration camp is, and who we who lived there are, you whose language becomes garbage when you talk about us, or to us, you who allow us to breathe among you only if we have killed a German or at least have sung by some campfire with partisans... And I am not, not suitable for you. They injected poison into my womb, they cut me and sent Jewish samples of me to a scientific institute in Berlin and I, instead of being ashamed, of wanting to die, I am the opposite, I have clung to life like a miserable worm." Anda is played by Keren Tsur, who has already given a number of impressive performances in roles of beautiful, strong young women. Now she creates a character that is very precisely delineated in her mode of speech, in her posture, in every movement of a hand or a shoulder, in her walk - and not for a moment does this come at the expense of a unique blend of strength and tenderness, pain and irony, decisiveness and perplexity. This is the sort of role for which she will be remembered for a long time, and for good reason. Mittelpunkt has written many plays, and has also directed many of them. He is one of the most brilliant writers of dialogue in Israeli dramaturgy, in a flexible, easily absorbed and honed Hebrew that hears the language of the street - not imitating it, but rather using it. In this drama he touches not only on an important moment in the history of the state, but also a wound that has been sutured so many times that the stitches have already become a scar that has lost its sensitivity. And every thing about the production - including the acting by Rafi Tavor, Yoram Hattab, Debbie Jablonka and Michal Kirzon, the apt set by Bambi Friedman, the costumes by Orna Smorgonsky (though Yoram Hattab's hat seems a bit excessive to me), Uri Vidislavsky's music and Keren Garnik's lighting - is, rightly, subordinated to this drama. To my mind, this play is more important than itself. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Trailblazer Haula Abu-Bakar named first Arab female professor in Israel. Hills of hostility A stranger coming to Hebron Saturday would be confused.

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