At the Beit Zvi Acting School in Ramat Gan, the play "Children's Trains" will be shown today, which tells the story of Eva Schlesinger, a girl who was smuggled on a train from Germany to England by her parents, to find refuge and save her life.
The play was written by the British-Jewish playwright Diane Samuels, and translated by the late Roni Pinkovich.
It will air today at 10:00, 13:00, 17:00 and 20:30 with the participation of the students at Beit Zvi.
One of the actresses is Tal Blank (26) from Ramat Gan, a granddaughter of Holocaust survivors.
"My grandmother was born in Poland in 1930," she says.
"When the war broke out she was exactly the age of my character in the show, 9. She and her family managed to escape to Russia, came to a labor camp in Siberia, and eventually came to Israel at the age of 16 after losing her entire family. Today she is 92. She handed over. "Her testimony at Yad Vashem, but I never asked her about her story directly. I did not have the courage. During rehearsals I thought a lot about her, about a 9-year-old girl who says you have to leave everything and run away and she does not understand why."
Another actress is Elia Levitan (24) from Degania B.
"I am a third generation Holocaust survivor," she says.
"My maternal grandfather from Lithuania, who survived years in labor camps, and my maternal grandmother from Hungary, lost most of her family members. I grew up on these stories. In the play I play the Nazi officer, and in rehearsals I was very resonant with my grandparents' story. "It's hard to play that role, to measure an outfit with a swastika. It took me a while to come to terms with the fact that I represent what happened, and that it's not me."
Director Etty Reznik says that through the play she first got to know the story of the children's trains.
"This subject is not taught in schools, and the general public is not aware of this dramatic story of children being smuggled on trains from December 1938 to September 1939. This is how about ten thousand Jewish children were scattered, scattered among families and orphans. Only 900 of them survived one of their parents. "The reason is that no one really wrote their history. Except for the families, no one knew what happened to them. I feel it is a mission to tell their story."
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