Holocaust Remembrance Day: "The Last Boy," based on writings of youths in concentration camp, to be performed in NYC
NEW YORK -- Wednesday is Holocaust Remembrance Day, and for one night only a play will bring to life the longest-running underground magazine, secretly produced by a group of teenage boys in a concentration camp.
Sadly, only one survived, but he is still alive today.
The performance of "The Last Boy" is based on his experience," CBS2's Lisa Rozner reported.
Despite being ripped apart from their families, there was hope inside dorm number 1 in Terezin Concentration Camp in what was then Czechoslovakia.
At 92 years old, Sidney Taussig, who immigrated to Brooklyn after the war, remembers the anthem roughly 16 boys would sing in secret.
Hundreds of pages of poems, prose and songs were documented in the underground magazine Vedem.
"They wrote for two years and in 1945 all 100 boys had been transported to Auschwitz except one," playwright and director Steve Fisher said.
Taussig, the only survivor, buried the material in unsuspecting oil canisters.
Fisher saw them on display at Terezin with a group of students and turned it into the play "The Last Boy."
CBS2 sat in on rehearsal at the Pearl Studios in Midtown as the actors prepared for a one-night benefit performance at the Town Hall Theater on April 27.
"Because it was a propaganda camp they didn't have to wear uniforms. They weren't tattooed because the Nazis wanted to stage a kind of city that suggested they were treating the Jews well," Fisher said.
Rosie Moss plays "Ela." She practices songs with the children for a Red Cross visit, and, coincidentally, visited the camp a decade ago.
"There is some terrible stories of posing with food and then having the food being taken away while these people are dying of starvation," Moss said. "It's really personal. I have family who narrowly escaped Eastern Europe."
A younger Taussig is portrayed by Bret Sherman of Springfield, New Jersey. His character is named "Mathias."
"They're regular boys that are in an extraordinary circumstance. We still play soccer and we still sing songs and there's still this boyhood about the piece, which I think is really beautiful," Sherman said.
He learned the piano, violin and heligonka, just as the boys did.
"The heligonka kind of alleviates the stress and anxiety of the boys anytime something happens, whether someone is called up to transport," Sherman said.
A little more than a dozen boys represent the real-life group. Twelve-year-old Ethan Mathias of Grand Rapids, Michigan plays "Ralph," whose goal is to have a bar mitzvah.
"He also wants to prove himself to be an adult. By asking the oldest boy in the room to teach him how to shave, he is constantly fighting with 'Otto,' who makes fun of him for being weak," Mathias said.
And recreating this story authentically on stage was important to the show. Everything from the clothing to the props has been sourced from all over.
"So anytime there's a poem, the editor of the magazine lights it," Fisher said. "The boys were very ingenious and they'd go, 'Oh, it's a carbide lamp.'"
Fisher said Taussig gave his blessing for the play as long as laughter was included. Fisher said he was inspired to tell the story after hearing an 8-year-old in a choir tell another child the holocaust didn't happen.
"With any young person, they see themselves on stage and they think, wow, these were ordinary boys like me who lived laughed and thought and were not perfect and then their lives were stolen from them, but when we remember them and recite their poetry, their legacy lives on," Fisher said.
The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum reports 15,000 children were taken to Terezin and 90 percent perished after being deported.
Children survivors of other camps will be in the audience Wednesday, and after the show candles will be lit to honor the lives lost.
Taussig now lives in Florida and has seen one of the songs from the show performed before it was turned into a play. It is planned to have a run on Broadway in 2023 and the hope is Taussig will see it sometime in the near future.
For more info on the show on Wednesday, please click here.
