Masha King portrays Helena Weinrauch, a Polish teenager, in the early days of the Second World War, in Kirk Gostkowski’s solo play A Will to Live.
New lives that spring from trauma can often take surprising turns. The people who may seem most likely to be permanently damaged can demonstrate the ability to heal, be empathetic, to love, and even to forgive. The indomitable spirit of Helena Weinrauch, whose world was brutally torn apart in occupied Poland during World War II, is reflected viscerally, visually, and poetically in A Will to Live, Kirk Gostkowki’s adaptation of Weinrauch’s 2008 memoir.
Under Rick Hamilton’s direction, Masha King gives an excruciatingly poignant performance as Weinrauch, painstakingly documenting her experience of Nazi atrocities. Greg Russ’s sound design provides a cacophony of voices from her past to assist in telling her story. The voices amplify a sense of terror and a foreboding of vengeful destruction.
Helena is arrested while posing as an Aryan and interned in a ghetto.
The play begins with Weinrauch’s convalescence in a hospital in Sigtuna, Sweden, a location where, out of large windows, one views sailboats on the sea, a cloudless sky, and bright Swedish summer nights. Weinrauch rests on a white metal bed near a steamer trunk. The placid scenery is in synch with Weinrauch’s few vivid, happy memories. It is serene, and until the play’s end, is the only scene where light and tranquility supplant darkness.
Weinrauch looks back on an idyllic, privileged childhood as the daughter of Maximilian and Gisela Weinstock, doting German-Jewish parents, who provide their Polish-born child with a rich cultural life. Recalling herself as an exuberant 16-year-old, Weinrauch recounts angering her music teacher and her mother by playing popular music, not classical works. The same set presages Weinrauch’s rapid descent from her life in Poland to someone who is hunted.
Weinrauch’s initial nostalgia about the prewar past is a brief respite from her treatment at the hands of demonic characters. After work one day, her employer warns the teenager not to leave the office. “You may not leave the room,” he tells her. “An Aktion is taking place—Jews are being rounded up for deportation.” Her boss locks her in, and when she eventually returns to her family’s apartment, her parents have been taken. She searches in vain for them and her older sister. Subsequently, Weinrauch’s boss secures forged identity papers identifying her as Aryan, and she is befriended by Ilse, a Nazi officer’s fiancée. They share a room, and reluctantly the teenager attends Nazi social events with Ilse, always afraid that her Jewish identity will be discovered. When Weinrauch is arrested by someone who recognizes her from her hometown, her near-utopia pivots in an instant into a waking nightmare of imprisonment, torture, and unspeakable Nazi horrors.
She is sent to Plaszow, and the narrative there becomes particularly chilling. The camp is run by Amon Goeth, whose savagery was made famous in Schindler’s List. Weinrauch shudders as Goeth fires capriciously at the camp’s inmates at roll call, killing those to her right and left, and is incredulous that she is still alive. Like other inmates, she has survived the moment, sometimes because of a rare, random act of kindness by an unexpected benefactor, such as Wladek, another inmate and brother of a girl she has befriended. Wladek lives by his wits, the black market, and by helping Goeth. When Wladek tells Goeth that he hopes to marry Weinrauch, Goeth doesn’t shoot her. He says:
You have hopes, you stupid fool? Don’t you know? All of you will be going up in smoke very soon. Ja! But for the next few weeks she can live.
Helena eventually becomes an inmate at Plaszow, Auschwitz, and Bergen Belsen concentration camps. At Plaszow she survives a series of random executions. Photographs by David Zayas Jr.
Wladek has bribed Goeth with jewelry for her reprieve, Helena explains: “What risks Wladek took offering valuables, which is punishable by death! He risked his life to save mine.”
Director Hamilton brilliantly employs multimedia—David Henderson’s projections, Russ’s sounds, and Michael Abrams’s lighting—to amplify the impact of this treatment on Weinrauch’s body and psyche. The Gestapo manipulates, isolates, intimidates, beats, and electrocutes Weinrauch to try to “break” her and discover who provided the forged documents identifying her as an ethnic German.
At 135 minutes, A Will to Live is not for the faint-hearted. The disembodied voices that recur as Weinrauch recalls her ordeal resemble a collective Greek chorus where individuals exemplify good and evil forces in the world. In this case, the voices represent Jews, their non-German Gentile helpers or abusers, and Nazis or Nazi sympathizers.
It is only because of her innate humanity that Helena Weinrauch, whose capacity for endurance in the face of tragedy seems superhuman, can say that “one has to go on and try to forgive. … [but] I will never forget.”
A Will to Live runs at the Chain Theatre (312 W. 36th St.) through Sept. 16. Evening performances are at 7 p.m. Wednesday through Saturday; matinees are at 2 p.m. Saturday and Sunday. For tickets and more information, call the box office at (917) 261-2446 or visit info@chaintheatre.org.
Playwright: Kirk Gostkowski
Director: Rick Hamilton
Set & Projection Design: David Henderson
Lighting Design: Michael Abrams
Costume Design: Debbi Hobson
Sound Design: Greg Russ
