KINDERTRANSPORT

 

By Diane Samuels

 

 

 

Rights: contact Susan Schulman

454 West 44th Street

New York, NY 10036

 

Actors: 6 actors

(5 specific roles and

 1 utility actor playing multiple authority figures and “The Rat Catcher.”)

 

Set: a storage room in an attic

 

Time and Place:  Late 1930’s Germany and in an outer London suburb today.

The action continually crosses over from the past to the present.

The set also becomes a train station, a train, and loading dock 

                        All accomplished by the use of lights and minimal set pieces.

 

Note: actors must learn British accents or German accents

 

 

“In the final nine months before World War II, nearly 10,000 unaccompanied Jewish children escaped from Germany on trains headed for the freedom of Britain. Most never saw their parents again. “Kindertransport” tells the story of Evelyn, a British woman in her fifties, and Eva, the nine-year-old German child she used to be.”  Diane Samuels

 













The play revolves around the chore of packing. On one side of the stage, the play opens in Germany, with nine-year-old Eva packing a small bag with her mother, Helga. Eva is leaving home to live with an unknown family in England.  In London in the present, on the other side of the stage, Faith has decided to leave home and get her own apartment. Her mother and grandmother are helping her pack by going through some extra dishes, lamps and linens that are stored in their attic. What should they take?  What should they leave behind? Faith’s mother is Evelyn, or Eva grown up.

 

Not surprisingly, Diane Samuels was an elementary school teacher and wrote plays for children’s theater. However, KINDERTRANSPORT is tough. It raises painful questions about family, safety, loyalty, and the need to belong. It deals with family secrets, the dark side of human nature, the cost of survival, loss of identity and the need to live. More specifically, it deals with mother-daughter relationships, and there are three sets in this play.

 

KINDERTRANSPORT resonates on many levels for high school and college students. I have seen three professional productions with various age groups performing or in attendance. At the Santa Monica Playhouse, teenage acting students from “The Dream Factory” in Warwickshire, England performed the roles. The troupe had visited concentration camps in Germany. They had met with beneficiaries of England’s Kindertransport and compared accounts from beneficiaries of similar evacuations from Cuba and Africa. Thus, they had a large dose of experience from which to draw, particularly regarding emotional cost to parents and children. Do we save our children or keep them in harm’s way?

 

My daughters sat spellbound through this performance in Santa Monica and the subsequent “talk-back.” Afterwards, my nine-year-old said that she would never forgive me if I sent her away. My eleven-year-old said she would probably send her child to safety. “Eva” was nine when she was placed on the train and never forgave her mother. She transforms on stage from a nine-year-old German girl to a stern British sixteen year old. She denounces her faith, accepts her “adopted” mother’s faith, changes her name from Eva to Evelyn, assimilates at school and stores all of her memories under lock and key in the attic. As the older Eva, or “Evelyn (played by another actress, naturally),” she marries, has a daughter and divorces. When young Eva is finally reunited with her mother at sixteen, there are two gut wrenching scenes, one where they see each other for the first time since the war, and the other where Eva decides not to join her mother on the trip to America. I cannot do them justice by writing about them, so I have included edited versions. 

 

Act II, scene I

 

EVELYN:       My father was gassed soon after arrival.

 

FAITH:           What about your mother?

 

EVELYN:       My mother…she…she was not gassed.

 

FAITH:           What happened to her?

 

Lights move to Helga, as she enters. She is utterly transformed- thin, wizened, old looking. Her hair is thin and short.

 

HELGA:         Ist das Eva? (Is it Eva?)

 

            Eva is speechless.

 

HELGA:         Bist Dud as, Eva?  (Is that you Eva?)

 

EVA:               Mother?

 

Helga approaches Eva and hugs her. Eva tries to hug back, but is clearly very uncomfortable.

 

HELGA:         Ich hatte Dich nicht erkannt.  (How much you have changed.)

 

EVA:               I’m sorry. I don’t quite understand.

 

HELGA:         How much you have changed.

 

EVA:               So have you.

 

HELGA:         You are sixteen now.

 

EVA:               Seventeen.

 

HELGA:         You are very pretty.

 

EVA:               This is a nice hotel. I can’t believe that you’re here.

 

HELGA:         I promised I would come, Eva.

 

EVA:               I’m called Evelyn now.

 

HELGA:         What is Evelyn?

 

EVA:               I changed my name.

 

HELGA:         Why?

 

EVA:               I wanted an English name.

 

HELGA:         Eva was the name of your great grandmother.

 

EVA:               I didn’t mean any disrespect.

 

HELGA:         No. Of course not.

 

EVA:               I’m sorry.

 

HELGA:         Nothing is the same anymore.

 

EVA:               It’s just that I’ve settled down now. There were no letters for all those years and then I saw the newsreels and newspapers...

 

HELGA:         I always promised I would come and get you.

 

EVA:               I was a little girl then.

 

HELGA:         I am sorry that there was such a delay. It was not of my making. (Pause.)

                        I am your Mutti, Eva.

 

EVA:               Evelyn. And adopted by Mr. and Mrs. Miller.

 

HELGA:         How can you be adopted when your own mother is alive for you?

 

EVA:               I thought you were dead.

 

 

Act II, scene II  (Helga and Evelyn are dockside.  Helga wants Evelyn to travel with her to America on the ship. She has two tickets. They will stay with a relative. Evelyn has decided not to go with her mother.)

 

HELGA:         Do you want to come and make a new life with me?

 

EVELYN:       Why do you keep asking me that?

 

HELGA:         Do you?

 

EVELYN:       It’s hard for me.

 

HELGA:         I lost your father. He was sick and they put him in line for the showers. I saw it. You know what I say to you. I lost him. But I did not lose myself. Nearly, a million times over, right on the edge of life, but I held on with my bones rattling inside me. Why have you lost yourself, Eva?

….

 

EVELYN:       I wish you had died.

 

HELGA:         I wish you had lived.

 

EVELYN:       I did my best.

 

HELGA:         Hitler started the job and you finished it.

 

EVELYN:       Why does it have to be my fault?

 

HELGA:         You cut off my fingers and pulled out my hair one strand at a time.

                       

EVELYN:       You threw me into the sea with all your baggage on my shoulders.

 

HELGA:         You can never excuse yourself.

 

EVELYN:       How could I swim ashore with so much heaviness on me? I was drowning in seas of salty water.

 

HELGA:         I have bled oceans out of my eyes.

 

EVELYN:       I had to let go to float.

 

HELGA:         Snake slithering out of yourself like it was unwanted skin. Worm.

 

EVELYN:       What right have you got to accuse me? You kept saying something…

                        ‘It’s time to go. You don’t need me. See. It’s good.’ Was it really so good very good, Muti? Was it really what you wanted? It wasn’t what I wanted.

 

HELGA:         My suffering is monumental. Yours is personal.

 

EVELYN:       What about what you did to me? You should have hung onto me and never let me go. Why did you send me away when you were in danger? No one made you. You chose to do it. Didn’t it ever occur to you that I might have wanted to die with you? Because I did. I never wanted to live without you and you made me. What is more cruel than that? Except for coming back from the dead and punishing me for surviving on my own.

 

                                                                                                            End scene