Sunday August 8 2004; Oswiecim, Poland. I’ve been here before. Once in person, many times in my mind. Even if you’re only a secular Jew, as I am, as Primo Levi was, it’s impossible not to come here in your bad dreams. If you’re gay too, as I am, you come here accused on two counts. Among many shocks ahead of me here in Auschwitz today is the discovery that my kind had a specific prison badge: a Star of David made up of a pink triangle inverted over a yellow one.
As on my previous trip (when I was visiting with the Holocaust Educational Trust), the gate gets me straightaway, the ‘Arbeit Macht Frei” gate. It’s as if something comes up through the ground. I start crying, I feel scared, lost, defenceless. This gate is so notorious it has gained mythic stature, and so you expect it to be colossal, looming upwards, throwing a long, sinister shadow. In reality it’s surprisingly ordinary —talk about the banality of evil — just high and wide enough for a military truck. It’s a gate, just a gate. Yes, as the saying went here, ‘You arrive through a gate, you leave through a chimney.”
I first read Levi’s If This Is a Man, the account of his year in Auschwitz, when I did Singer at the Royal Shakespeare Company in 1989. The play’s author, Peter Flannery, had used the book as research for the opening scene. I was instantly drawn to Levi’s voice, to his detail and humanity. Could this book make a piece of theatre in itself? I was sure of only one thing. You can’t put Auschwitz on stage, or indeed celluloid, in any conventional way. Although I rate Singer as a major modern play, I felt deep unease wearing the zebra-striped uniform of the camps. Later, the same thing occurred when I did the TV film Genghis Cohen. Me, a free and well-fed man, in these clothes — no, there was something unacceptable here. My sense about If This Is a Man was that you could only stage it as Levi’s testimony. In my mind was Claude Lanzmann’s remarkable Holocaust documentary, Shoah, where survivors recount their experiences, and he never shows the gruesome but over-familiar footage of the camps.
I tried an experimental draft, losing some sections of the book entirely (and it was painful to lose, for example, the great ‘Canto of Ulysses” chapter), but keeping the rest very faithful to Levi’s words, and turning these into a simple monologue. I showed the results to Richard Wilson, a director whose key word is minimalism, and he thought it might work. Together, we took the idea to the National.
Securing the rights from the Levi estate was not easy. They’ve never let anyone near this book, and with good reason — imagine what Hollywood might do with it. But eventually, hugely helped by Nick Hytner and Jack Bradley (the National Theatre’s literary manager), we won their trust.
Now that we had the green light, Richard and I immediately decided we’d visit Auschwitz (as we’re doing today), and also the place Levi missed most during his incarceration, Turin (as we’re doing later), and specifically the address 75 Corso Re Umberto. This is where he was born, where he died, and where, apart from one year in Milan (working as a chemist, his main profession), and his time in Auschwitz, he lived his whole life.
Then Richard made a surprising proposal: before rehearsals began, we should do a fortnight’s workshop at the National’s Studio, and this should include other actors. He felt we should attempt to improvise — if only symbolically — some of the episodes in the book. In planning these, Richard started referring to them as ‘punishment exercises”. Richard is both my closest friend and severest critic. I said, ‘But Richard, why would I need punishment exercises when I’ve got you as director?”
So four actors joined me for the workshop: one who was Jewish (Elliot Levey) and could play another prisoner, and three who were fluent in German (Christoph Hülsen, Nick Fletcher, Rupert Wickham) and could play guards. In the camps, one of your worst early experiences was trying to obey orders in a language you didn’t understand.
At this time, half way through the workshop, I have to report that these improvisations, some which last for several hours, some which take place in the dark, are disturbing, to put it mildly, but undeniably useful. The German-language factor is crazy and frightening. The guards are shouting, telling you to do things, and you don’t know what they’re saying. But of course Elliot and I can cry ‘Stop” at any point. We’ve also banned physical violence and nudity, which the SS exploited, and which has been proved recently, at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib jail, to be the easiest way to humiliate prisoners.
The rest of the workshop is more traditional. The actors are impressive: committing themselves fully even though they won’t be in the production. Seeing them perform short Holocaust testimonies, and hearing them read the script, I’m learning a lot about the task ahead. We’re also watching documentaries, reading, discussing, and, most importantly meeting survivors. We’ve already had a visit from 80-year-old Trude Levi. We sat hushed as her story poured from her with strange and moving urgency. Next week we’ve invited Josef Perl, who spent his entire adolescence in various camps. But before that, Richard and I are leaving the group for the weekend, to fly to Poland …
And so on a sunny Sunday in August we find ourselves in Auschwitz. My partner Greg (Doran) has come along to hold my hand — literally, some of the time — and our guide is the quiet and gentle Krzysztof Antonczyk, a top historian at the Auschwitz State Museum. This camp claimed three of his relatives — partisans. Huge crowds are visiting today. At first I find this oppressive; later I realise it’s good that so many people want to see this place. Not all are welcome though. Greg notices a piece of graffiti on the reception building: someone has drawn a swastika, and someone else has crossed it out with furious strokes. The tour is invaluable, and profoundly upsetting. You think you’ve seen it all, but it’s different when you’re actually here. The ‘Arbeit Macht Frei” gate — the torture posts, where prisoners had their hands tied behind their backs, and then, held by this fastening, were hoisted off the ground — the giant display cases of hair, all faded to a ghostly grey, or of artificial legs and hands, their shapes half-human. To stand in the gas chamber in the main camp, Auschwitz I, is to be in one of the ugliest places on Earth. The dark stains on the walls could be of damp, of soot, or just of death.
I’m fascinated by something which Krzysztof points out: the false information on the official documents. The cause of youthful deaths is often recorded as ‘heart attacks”, the doomed in the Selections just need ‘special treatment”. Why? If you truly believed that Jews, communists, homosexuals, Gypsies and others were a form of low-life requiring extermination, why cover up? I take some comfort from it. At least they knew they were doing wrong.
As well as showing us Auschwitz II (Birkenau) — a vast bleak expanse with the railway tracks, the huts, the crematorium — Krzysztof also takes us to the site of Auschwitz III (Monowitz), which the public wouldn’t normally visit. This is where Levi himself was held, first as one of the slave labourers building the neighbouring Buna rubber factory, then as a chemist in the laboratory there. His camp has now vanished (except for one barracks converted into someone’s farm storehouse), and the whole location has reverted to being a village. It’s just a few single-storyed houses and smallholdings, where goats and ducks shelter in the shade today, standing very still, watching us pass. We don’t see any people at all. There’s a strange atmosphere here. Maybe it’s just Sunday afternoon.
After visiting Auschwitz, the ordinary world seems surreal — back in Krakow we’re staying in the Holiday Inn, for God’s sake. In the hotel bar, where alcohol is urgently required, we try to debrief, but it’s difficult; the experience has been overwhelming. Greg can’t stop crying. He says, ‘I felt so angry in that place, I hate what we did to ourselves there.” I ask, ‘Who’s we?” He and Richard reply in unison: ‘We — us — human beings.”
Yes. As a result of today’s trip, I think I have a better understanding of something Levi says at the end of the book, when he describes the Russian army reaching Auschwitz on January 27 1945. He says that the liberators and the liberated were both overcome by the same thing, a feeling of shame. —