A brave and successful attempt to imagine the incomprehensible

Do we still not know enough about Auschwitz? A search in the digital archive of the Netherlands Institute for War Documentation library yields 600 hits. But these are scientific documents – eyewitness accounts, trial reports and suchlike. No more than words. What actually happened there is, of course, almost incomprehensible. And for this reason probably impossible to bring to life.

That is why novelists have attempted to fathom the nature of the camp. And, over the years, a number of feature films and documentaries have been made that attempt to portray Auschwitz or some other death camp: from the television series Holocaust (1978) to Spielberg’s Schindler’s List (1993), and everything in between.

With the passing of the years the ‘reality quotient’ of these films ahs increased, but the distance remains, because you are sitting in a comfortable chair in the cinema. There have been noticeably fewer plays than films made about the subject, probably due to the more intimate nature of the theatre when compared with film: you are, literally, nearer to the actors.

Hotel Modern theatre company decided to take advantage of this and approach reality in an entirely new way. Not using uniforms and boots to instil fear, but diminution and magnification. The stage is covered – with scale models of barracks, the entrance gates, a ‘functioning’ gas chamber, a second gas chamber under construction, train tracks, plenty of barbed wire and, above all, many small puppets.

More than 3000 simply fashioned puppets made of wire, fabric and clay represent the prisoners and some guards. From the raised seating of the auditorium, the audience has a view of the camp that the prisoners and the guards never had. The three actors use tiny cameras to follow the proceedings and project these scenes, larger than life-size, onto the screen at the rear wall.

One of the first images is a projection from a watchtower. As an audience member, one is an observer, watching over the shoulder of a soldier ‘guarding’ the camp through the sight of his rifle. One expects him to shoot at any moment. He does not. But elsewhere almost everything that took place in Auschwitz is depicted: the arrival of the train, selection, a suicide against the electric fence, the camp orchestra, drunk guards having a party. And there are also scenes in the gas chamber itself, and the burning of corpses.

Kamp is, then, not a reverential approach to this mass murder, but neither is it a trivialisation. It is a brave and successful attempt to imagine the incomprehensible.

31-12-2005