Pauline Kalker, a founder of the Dutch theater company Hotel Modern, never uses the word toy when referring to her company’s work ‘Kamp’, a 36-by-33-foot model of Auschwitz populated by 3.000 three-inch-tall figures. ‘The word is not in our vocabulary,’ said Ms. Kalker in accented English in a telephone interview from Spain, where the group was on tour. ‘We are making a live animation film on stage.’ Yet ‘Kamp’, which mixes theater, music, video, sculpture and puppetry, is scheduled for six performances this week starting on Wednesday as part of the Toy Theater Festival at St. Anne’s Warehouse in Brooklyn. The festival celebrates miniature and puppet theaters, a popular 19^th-century art form, from around the world. Ms. Kalker and her partners Arlène Hoornweg and Herman Helle arrived in New York over the holiday weekend to set up the ‘Kamp’ scale model, a process that typically takes two days.

The 1986 publication of ‘Maus’,  Art Spiegelman’s acclaimed graphic novel, in which Jews were portrayed as mice and Nazis as cats, helped pave the way for Holocaust stories to be told in genres that once might have been seen as too idiosyncratic or irreverent. Ms. Kalker said that after mounting a critically acclaimed 2001 show about World War I that featured miniature figures, she realized that the company could approach Auschwitz similarly without lapsing into cliché. ‘Our medium had a special way of telling the war theme,’ she said.

Mr. Helle, who designed the models, said he started with one figure and one barracks. ‘We didn’t know exactly what story we could tell,’ he said. He then made 100 puppets, but the three partners realized that was not enough. He made 300; still not enough. Even after making 3.000, he said, they recognized they could only present a fraction of the total picture. The small figures are made of wire with heads of Plasticine, a clay that hardens when baked. The expressions – from poked in eyes, noses and mouths – are frozen in Munch-like howls. The prisoners wear black-and-white-striped cloth. For the guards and the new trainloads of arrivals, Mr. Helle photocopied old photographs, cut out the clothes and hats and glued them on. ‘We were looking for an easy and fast way to make them,’ he said. Mr. Helle made the translucent bodies of the naked, gassed prisoners out of hot glue that melted around wire frames. ‘It makes them look very vulnerable, ‘ he said. About 10 visual artists helped with the models. The whole projects took about eight months to construct. The complete installation, made mostly of plain gray corrugated cardboard, includes barracks, guard towers, crematoriums, gas chambers with buckets of gas pellets, a dining hall for the gueards, a train and tracks, and the notorious gateway sign, ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’, ‘Work Makes You Free’.

At performances of ‘Kamp’, the three artists move the figures around the set. The tiny puppets sweep, shovel rocks and line up to be counted. Prisoners are beaten and executed by hanging; others are gassed; corpses are buried or burned. Using a small camera, Mr. Helle films the figures in a tight frame, projecting the images in close-up on the wall of the theater. The audience is seated around the model, as if looking down at the camp from a mountainside. ‘All the time you have an overview,’ Ms. Kalker explained, ‘and with the camera, we give you an insider’s view of what is happening in the camp. We want to make the audience eyewitnesses.’

Hotel Modern experimented with different methods of storytelling. The artists tried working with a script. One idea was to have a Mengele-like doctor performing medical experiments. ‘It didn’t work at all, ‘ Mr. Helle said. ‘It was too much like a history lesson.’ Another idea was to have a group of women talk about food and cooking, or have a Nazi official visit. Those proposals were also scrapped. The nearly hour-long show has no dialogue, but there is sound from small microphones, which amplify the sweeping, and from the miniature railway, as well as added recorded effects that include the sounds of wind, swallows, industrial clanging and a screeching squeak from a cart that Mr. Helle taped while visiting Auschwitz itself.

Ms. Kalker, whose grandfather died at the camp, said she invited Holocaust survivors, including her cousin Ralph Prins, a sculptor, to see early versions of ‘Kamp’. ‘I asked him to see it, if he thought it was appropriate,’ Ms. Kalker said. ‘We wanted their approval,’ she said of the survivors. The work has received good reviews, except in Germany, where ‘Kamp’ provoked a mixed response. Ms. Kalker said she thought Germans were still figuring out how to deal with this part of their history. Critics complained that ‘using puppets was making it seem banal, ‘ she said, or they thought ‘it was in bad taste.’ Responding to that point, she noted that Auschwitz and other camps have miniature models of their original layouts today in their visitors’ centers.

For their performances in Spain last week, Hotel Modern showed a different piece, called ‘Shrimp Tales’. It is a comedy starring 400 prawns, who play human beings eating in restaurants; attending church, a wedding and a funeral; playing the piano; boxing, giving birth; performing surgery; lining up for an episode of ‘Antiques Roadshow’; and landing on the moon. ‘We have a humorous side,’ Ms. Kalker said. ‘I would not want to perform only ‘Kamp’.

01-06-2010

La compagnie Hotel Modern trouve la bonne distance pour parler des camps de la mort.

Auschwitz en marionnettes? La proposition peut légitimement susciter un certain sentiment d’incrédulité, voire de malaise. La compagnie néerlandaise Hotel Modern l’a osé, pourtant, en un spectacle extraordinaire et bouleversant, Kamp, créé à Rotterdam (Pays-Bas) en 2005 et qui, depuis, ne cesse de tourner dans toute l’Europe. En France, on a pu le voir juste quelques soirs en 2006 à La Ferme de Buisson, à Noisiel (Seine-et-Marne), puis en 2008, à Malakoff (Haute-de-Seine). Le revoilà au Centquatre, à Paris, où il fait l’ouverture de Temps d’Images, le festival qui mêle arts de la scène, arts plastiques et visuels. Il lance une belle programmation placée sous le signe des relations entre l’indicible et les images.

Kamp, c’est donc le camp d’Auschwitz reconstitué dans ses moindres détails, en une vaste maquette qui occupe l’espace de la scène. Les baraquements, la ligne de chemin de fer, les barbelés, le portail où s’affichaient les mots ‘Arbeit macht frei’ (le traivail rend libre), et même les chambres à gaz et les fours crématoires. A l’intérieur, trois mille figurines de 8 centimètres de haut, représentant les déportés et leurs gardiens, manipulées par trois marionnettistes de la compagnie. Le spectacle montre la machine de mort industrielle à l’œuvre, en un journée ‘ordinaire’, si l’on peut dire, du camp. Le génie des trois animateurs de la compagnie, Herman Helle, Pauline Kalker et Arlène Hoornweg, c’est d’avoir trouvé, grâce à la marionnette, une forme de représentation à la fois véridique et abstraite, proche et distanciée. Autrement dit, qui peut susciter une forme d’identification retenue et réflexive, loin de toute émotion facile. Les figurines, que l’on doit à Herman Helle, le plasticien de la compagnie, sont en elles-mêmes fascinantes. Modelés dans l’argile, les visages, tous différents, s’inspirant du Cri, le célèbre tableau de Munch. Les corps en fil de fer revêtus du pyjama rayé deviennent transparents, moulés dans une sorte de résine, à l’approche de la chambre à gaz. Corps-fantômes, ceux qui sont jetés dans la fosse commune sont façonnés dans la glaise, à laquelle ils semblent se mêler.

Le deuxième coup de génie des créateurs d’Hotel Modern, c’est la manière dont ils jouent sur le macro et le micro. Le regard du spectateur embrasse à la fois l’ensemble du camp, avec ses figurines qui ont juste la taille nécessaire pour qu’on les distingue depuis la salle, et de multiples détails filmés en direct sur le plateau et projetés sur l’écran de fond de scène, en des images tremblées, nocturnes, spectrales. Les micros-caméras entrent dans les dortoirs des baraquements, dans les valises où traînent encore les effets personnels des déportés, dans les miradors, dans la chambre à gaz. Elles s’attardent sur les visages muets, empreints d’incompréhension face à l’impensable. Pas de paroles. Mais un travail sur le son sophistiqué renforçant la sensation d’un monde fantôme, irrémédiablement voué à hanter les esprits. C’est l’ensemble de ce travail sur l’image, le son, les figurines, le rapport troublant et délicat entre les marionnettes et leurs manipulateurs deus ex machina aussi, qui éloigne la représentation de tout réalisme et la charge de toute sa force expressive.

‘Au début, nous avons travaillé avec des éléments plus réalistes,’ racontent Pauline Kalker et Ruud van der Pluijm, qui signe la conception sonore du spectacle. ‘Il devait y avoir du texte, et des sons issus du réel comme des hurlements d’hommes ou de chiens. On s’est rendu compte que cela ne marchait pas, que ces éléments nous ramenaient du côté de l’anecdotique, qu’ils avaient même quelque chose de nauséabond. Et, aussi, que la magie apportée par la figurine disparaissait avec la présence du texte…On a fait l’expérience de l’inexprimable, et on est allés vers davantage d’abstraction. L’étonnement que nous cherchons à créer s’accroît avec l’absence d’explication.’

‘Fabriquer des marionnettes que nous allons gazer ou pendre, reproduire Auschwitz en miniature, c’est étrange, indubitablement,’ remarque Pauline Kalker, qui note la dimension de ‘catharsis personnelle’ que revêt pour elle le spectacle – son grand-père est mort dans les camps. La catharsis a lieu aussi pour le spectateur, tant l’équipe d’Hotel Modern a trouvé la forme juste, avec ses milliers de figurines stylisées qui, effectivement, exercent leur fonction magique de symbolisation et d’appropriation. En 2014, on pourra voir un peu partout en France La Grande Guerre, autre spectacle remarquable, sur la guerre de 1914-1918, signé par les créateurs d’Hotel Modern – des artistes qui ont bien raison de penser qu’ils peuvent partir à l’assaut des grands sujets avec leurs petites marionnettes.

19-9-2013

In The Great War, the Dutch theater company Hotel Modern simulated the reality of the World War I battlefield in all its muddy, body-mangled horror through the projection of toy soldiers and miniature objects onto a screen. Live animation – or more precisely, the theatrical recreation of a live animation stage work – was able to accomplish what the vast literature on trench warfare has sometimes struggled to depict: the man-made hell that turned the natural landscape into an open grave for a generation of soldiers.

The group is back in Los Angeles with an even starker historical mandate: to re-create a model of the Auschwitz death camp, where the grandfather of Hotel Modern’s Pauline Kalker spent his final days. The entire stage, filled with squat buildings, train tracks and barbed-wire fences, is transformed into a deathly sand-colored scale model of the extermination camp. Figurines are wordlessly manipulated by Kalker, Arlène Hoornweg and Herman Helle, the multimedia artists who go about their business with brisk, neutral efficiency. The daily routines of these inanimate figures are projected onto a screen, and it’s there that you can see the condition of the skeletal prisoners, as the camera closes in on their shaved heads, sunken eyes and hollowed cheeks.

The labor forced upon them by Nazi guards constitutes a form of physical torture that is excruciating to watch. When one prisoner collapses, a guard savagely beats him, the thud repeating mercilessly as the violence tears through cartilage into bone. The gas chambers are recreated through the mountain of shoes and clothes that are left outside and the mysterious salts in containers with skull and cross-bones labels that are poured before another group is rendered lifeless. The sheer number of corpses defies comprehension. The trains roll in, and Jewish families are pulled out like inhuman cargo. Sickly hordes are marshaled at night under the lights for what resembles a zombie march. The bone and ash piles keep rising.

The slurping that accompanies the dispensing of watery soup served out of a trash can is one of the most pitiful sounds I’ve heard in a theater. But the most harrowing aspect of Ruud van der Pluijm’s sound design just might be the impervious wind that blows relentlessly through the camp. That sound was somehow even more terrifying than the boisterous carousing of drunken Nazis after another day’s murderous work.

Never forget. Our collective imperative has grown more difficult by the distance of time and the willfulness of denial. How many today have never adequately learned about the Holocaust or fully accepted the lessons that it teaches about the barbarism that even the most civilized societies are capable of? Kamp isn’t for the faint of heart. I gasped and groaned. At times, I had to look away. But I was grateful for the courage and the craft of Hotel Modern and for the timeliness of this historical recreation. It can’t happen here? Kamp reminds us that the unthinkable can come to pass whenever humanity turns its back on the values upon which its own sanity and security rest.

22-9-2018

The atrocities at Auschwitz cannot be contained by any existing theatrical space or any single 60-minute performance, no matter how innovative, which is one reason why critics have found Kamp, the mixed-media work by the Dutch company Hotel Modern, so audacious. The scope of the project may be immense, but the company works — quite literally — in miniature, using puppets and models to depict the working life of the Nazi concentration camp.

“Using models, you can bring the whole world into the theater literally, very big themes, not only emotionally but physically,” said Pauline Kalker, one of the three performing artists who created Kamp. Audiences witness what might have been a typical day at Auschwitz, with the horror of the camp on full display. Trains arrive with new prisoners. Hundreds of Plasticine figures in black-and-white-striped pajamas are gathered for “roll call.” A garish sign over the entrance proclaims, “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work makes you free). Here, it doesn’t. You witness people scrubbing floors and toting sandbags. You also see prisoners beaten or murdered in the gas chambers. All of this plays out on a cardboard stage filled with scale models of buildings and more than 3,000 miniature figures manipulated by three performance artists. There is a soundtrack but no dialogue. Cameras zoom in to bring elements of the action into close-up on screens surrounding the action.

“The stagecraft is ingenious,” said Mark Murphy, artistic director of the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts (REDCAT) Theater, where Kamp will play for four performances. “But also there’s the incredible sensitivity to the horror of the material they are addressing. They are very matter-of-fact in the way they approach it. If you say, ‘They’re using puppets and miniature buildings and dolls to examine the Holocaust,’ it sounds like a terrible idea,” Murphy conceded. “But as you can see from the reviews and the ways that people have responded to it, it’s highly effective, profoundly moving and very sensitive.”

Kamp’s inspiration was Joseph Kalker, a doctor who died at Auschwitz, and the grandfather of company performing artist Pauline Kalker. Following the success of their World War I project, The Great War, Kalker felt the need to produce a work that had a stronger personal connection to the Holocaust. Her two fellow Hotel Modern company members, Arlène Hoornweg and Herman Helle, were receptive to the idea, but Kalker still had some lingering doubts. “It was difficult on many levels, first because my father was Jewish and my mother is not,” Kalker said. “Also, I had this feeling of ‘Am I allowed to tell this story?’ But later I thought, ‘That’s stupid. My grandfather was killed and my father was in hiding,’ but I felt like I had to ask permission of the Jewish community to see how they would feel.”

The artists began to build the piece, researching the extermination camps at Auschwitz-Birkenau and re-creating the layout via models created by Herman Helle, Kalker’s husband. They brought Auschwitz survivors and members of the Jewish community into the studio to discuss the concept of the show and to look at the models. Even on the miniatures, several survivors were able to identify barracks where they had been housed. According to Kalker, some survivors have said they found Kamp to be cathartic and have seen the show multiple times. Others have given the performance their blessing but couldn’t bring themselves to watch it. After each performance, audiences are invited to come down to the stage to take a closer look and to ask questions. “There’s a chance to speak directly with the artists and also to break that fourth wall and for a moment commune with the set and the objects that were used to convey such a difficult story,” Murphy said. “That’s a very important part of the experience.”

Hotel Modern created Kamp in 2005 and has taken the performance across Europe, and to Canada, Japan and Australia. In 2019, dates scheduled for France and in Kalker’s hometown of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. Kalker has not been part of every engagement and she notes that the work is by no means easy to perform. Seven years ago, she had to return to Kamp a few months after giving birth to her daughter. “That was hard. To tell this horrible story again,” Kalker said. “Sometimes I’ve felt I wish I could leave it all behind, but then I think I can’t do that. It’s such a part of my father’s life and a part of my life. It’s been very rewarding to have found a way to share this history with an audience.”

17-9-2018

One of the most astonishing theatrical productions this summer in NYC occurred at St. Ann’s Warehouse, which hosted the Great Small Works 9th International Toy Theater Festival. But to call Kamp from the Rotterdam-based troupe Hotel Modern a theater piece doesn’t even come close to describing their re-imagining of Auschwitz as a breathtaking scale model peopled by thousands of three-inch tall miniatures, looking like a European version of Mexico’s Day of the Dead figurines. Taking up the entire stage, the intricate and precise installation would fit right at home at the Whitney Biennial and includes not only rows of barracks and a railroad track but also the phrase ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ emblazoned on a gateway.

Through this setting three company members, two women and a man dressed in drab grey outfits, manipulate the tiny, nameless and mute characters and project the results in real time upon a large back screen via equally miniature cameras. What better way to get at the essence of one of history’s most surreal events than by presenting the Holocaust in such a surreal fashion?

12-6-2006

Come l’esercito di terracotta. Una distesa di 3 mila puppets riempie lo spazo del palcosscenico 10 metri par 10. Ma non si tratta degli orgogliosi geurriri allineati e vincenti per la gloria del loro imperatore, bensì dei prigionieri dimessi e perdenti di un campo di concentramento nazista. <> in scena al Festival di Spoleto (San Simone), ricostruisce in un grande plastico la vita e sopratutto la morte nel lager di Auschwitz. Lo spettacolo è realizzato dall’olandese Hotel Modern Theatre Company, ideato e diretto da Pauline Kalker, Herman Helle, Arlène Hoornweg.

Sono state riprodotto con precisione le baracche, le torette di avvistamento, le recinzioni di filo spinato, le camere a gas, il treno piombato e il cancello d’ingresso su cui spicca la tragicamente ironica scritta <>: il lavoro rende liberi. Le marionette, uomini e donne in casacca a strisce, ovvero le vittime, militari in divisa, i carnefici, sono alto solo 8 centrimetri. Ma i loro movimenti, guidati dagli animatori e prolettati con microtelecamere su un ampio schermo, assumono proporzioni gigantesche.

<>.

Il senso di realtà è rafforzato della presenza di tre performer che si muovono nel plastico come reporter di guerra giganti, interagendo con la moltitudine degli internati: <>.

Non c’è musica di accompagnamento: <>.

L’obiettivo degli ideatori è perpetuare la memoria: << L’odio purtroppo è dentro di noi e bisogna esserne consapevoli per dominario. Non credo – continua la Kalker – che ci fossero molte persone che volessero veramente, che condividessero le persecuzioni. Di securo, però, l’hanno permesso>>.

11-07-2015

Kamp is quite fascinating. The sprawling camp in about 1:25 scale is full of thousands of inmates in drab porisoner garb. There are all the emblematic, eerily familiar ingredients that we have come to dread: the barbed wire, bunkhouses, railway siding, gas chambers and incinerators. Most of the performance and all of the dialogue is in our brains. We know the story. Few people are innocent of that knowledge, so there is no need for dialogue or anything more than mute observation.

On stage, three performers from Rotterdam’s Hotel Modern company move around and use miniature camera technology to capture close-up the daily life of the camp. A lot of scenes are played out to a soundtrack that starts with night sounds, then martial music, then many sound effects. The detail in puppets and models becomes plain. We see row upon row of new arrivals, dressed in their Sabbath best and with their suitcases, marched off to the building where first we see shoes, then clothes, then naked bodies.

Around this central tragedy, the unextraordinary life of the camp plays on, from dawn to night, asking us to accept the tragedy and replace it with the drwan-out misery of those who live on. It becomes, in truth, a bit dreary. It’s like a diorama you might see in a museum, but a moving diorama in more ways than one. The camera captures scenes, vignettes and short stories, such as a morning gallows execution, and puts them up on a screen behind the model. That is something new in theatre: to watch a cluster of three real poeple gather among the model bunkhouses to enact lives long forgotten that will never be memorialised and write them large on the screen.

14-03-2013

Auschwitz looms large in our big-picture history of the 20th century ’til today and forever. Perhaps too large for many people to genuinely grasp the infinite realities of what went on inside the concentration camp that epitomises Germany’s most abonimable World War II atrocities. It also has loomed far greater in millions of personal histories – mine for one, as the place where a mother’s parents, brother and many other family and her friends perished at the hands of the nazi regime’s war criminals. We could use a whole other rightfully angry vocabulary to describe what went on 70 yeras ago and the impact the concentration camps and entwined racial and cultural brutalities had on millions around the world since. But like the Dutch members of the Hotel Modern theatre group, who have created and perform Kamp at this year’s Adelaide Festival, each finds their own way of dealing with such horrors.

To build a miniature (1:20 scale) Auschwitz and Birkenau, the base and labour camp plus accompanying extermination camp, and populate it with thousands of tiny puppets is an act of artistic courage and irreversible truth. There is no personal narrative in the staging of Kamp. Individual suffering is transformed to the communal by theatrical downscaling. Ironic, perhaps. Mesmerising – most certainly. But then there’s the genius projection of Lilliputian horrors from small set to large-screen nightmare underneath a bleak, wintry soundscape. The unanimated, methodical movement of all those puppet prisoners and eventual corpses across the set by three grey automation-like performers mirrors the diabolical heartlessness of the real camp staffers at the height of Germany’s so-called ‘Final Solution’ to rid its world of millions of Jewish people. And most powerfully the unrelenting distorted, minimalist faces of the puppet cast are more than enough to call from a not-too-distant past the great suffering that for many is now simply a textbook chapter or Hollywood film concept.

It is those miniature puppet faces in all their abominable hunger, their desperate confusion as it turns to unbelievable fear, and their eventual steps into the hell of the gas chambers, all acted out in extraordinary miniature, that tells the mind-boggling story for those looking in as a theatrical experience. For someone personally connected to the larger story, that same artistic fascination soon transforms into a forever sad chapter of history that has never drifted far from the surface of daily life. Three of those inanimate puppet faces were indeed the most human ever imaginable – my grandparents and uncle. In terms of their performance in Kamp, my own critical rating is: truly unforgettable.

14-03-2013

In Kamp, a production by Dutch theatre company Hotel Modern, a gigantic scale model of Auschwitz covered the floor of St. Ann’s Warehouse, an avant-garde performance space in the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. Measuring 36 x 33 feet, the set was meticulously rendered, complete with rows of barracks, crematoria, and a sign that declares “Arbeit Macht Frei” (work makes you free). Fenced in by barbed wire and guard towers, 3,000 three-inch-tall figures of prisoners and guards “performed” a series of vignettes that depicted the debasement and viciousness of the Holocaust in a harrowing and visually arresting manner. The three members of Hotel Modern, Pauline Kalker, Arlene Hoornweg, and Herman Helle, dressed in muted earth-tones, manipulated the figures around the set, depicting a day in the life of Auschwitz. Guided by hands, by control sticks, and by wire, prisoners filled bags with stone, ate soup from makeshift bowls, and were sent to die in gas chambers. Often acting as documentary filmmakers, the three performers captured the action as it unfolded using small handheld digital cameras. These images were then projected in real time on the rear wall of the theatre. No one spoke in the piece, and no words were needed. Through innovative use of digital technology and puppetry, Kamp evoked the gross absurdities and terrors of the Holocaust. It was an hour-long tour of hell in miniature.

Structurally, Kamp alternated sequences in which the puppeteers moved within the set, preparing the figures for the next scene, with the scenes themselves. Importantly, there were no individual characters in Kamp. There was no real story-arc outside of the progression of day to night, no “girl in a red coat” with whom to empathize, as in Steven Spielberg’s 1993 film Schindler’s List. Without any characters with whom to connect, the audience was forced to consider the vast scope of the horror.

Created by troupe member Helle, the crudely fashioned figures who occupied the space of the camp were made of moldable plasticine and paint. With holes for eyes, a nub for a nose, and a gaping mouth, their doughy faces recalled Edvard Munch’s iconic The Scream. Ultimately ambiguous in affect, these faces suggested bewilderment, anger, alarm, exertion, desperation, or pain depending on the context. That the very same faces were to be found on the SS officers suggested, paradoxically, both a common humanity despite the circumstances, and also how the mechanization of death rendered everyone inhuman.

The performers’ manipulations of the figures worked in precise choreography with the cameras, giving a sense of what Kalker, one of the founders of Hotel Modern, has termed a “live animation film onstage.” The audience, seated at a distance from the tiny figures, viewed the action in tight close-ups. Such apparent proximity to the action—in a space where death is omnipresent—created a sense of perpetual dread. Death seemed always to be lurking just off-screen.

Interactions between puppeteer and figure often created meaningful symbolism. In a vignette at the beginning of the piece, four prisoners were hanged at a tiny gallows in the middle of the camp. Slowly, almost tenderly, a puppeteer placed small boxes under the gallows. Then the puppeteer placed the heads of figures in the nooses. Finally, the hand of a puppeteer reached over, in view of the camera and the audience, and pulled each block away one at a time. The hand appeared so large onscreen that it seemed almost God-like in scope, a parody of Michelangelo’s The Creation of Man. The camera shot framed the dangling figure, an object seeming to struggle and jerk, but eventually becoming still. This was repeated over and over until finally the camera panned away to reveal a group of thirty more prisoner figures that looked as if they were watching the event. Their gaping mouths seemed to be reacting to the execution. The scene ended with the camera operator placing a finger over the lens. The human hand that manipulated the figures (and ended the scene) evoked the role humans play in the destruction of their fellows.

Although visited upon puppets, the violence was shocking in its cruelty. In one sequence, a guard brutalized a weakened prisoner, striking him with a stick. The mangled figure left behind seemed terribly human; we empathized not with any one character, but with the vulnerability of the body. Later, outside the crematoria, the audience viewed a mass grave. The plastic of the figures was often melted into an undifferentiated mass of blobs and body parts. In this space, which assaults logic, the borders among bodies become permeable. Similarly, the few touches of whimsy that Hotel Modern included carried serious implications. Early in the piece, a group of prisoners carried an actual brick to construct barracks. To the viewer, such actions seemed almost ant-like, as the figures carried far more than their own weight—an impossible task. Yet this image corresponds with the utter impossibility of life in such a place.

The sound design of Kamp enhanced the sense movement from place to place. In one sequence, rowdy German drinking songs accompanied the camera to the German officers’ mess hall. The song faded when the camera later took us to the prisoners’ barracks in a different part of the camp. When an inmate committed suicide by throwing himself on an electrified fence, the simple movement of the figure, writhing on the wires, combined with the shrieking sounds of the electricity, was ghastly and affecting.

Kamp is not the only production to use puppets to depict the horrors of the Holocaust. In FABRIK: The Legend of M. Rabinowitz, the Norwegian American troupe Wakka Wakka used puppetry to a similar, if differently plotted, effect. In both cases, the inanimate body of the puppet acted upon and manipulated by the human operator drove home the fact that human hands also performed the events of the Holocaust, and it forced audiences to bear witness to the consequences of human cruelty in a new and vital way.

03-06-2010

Recreating —if that is the right word— the daily routine of mass murder at Auschwitz with miniature puppets made of plasticine may not seem a promising enterprise. However artfully done, it could make what actually happened look trivial, like a kind of game.

And yet Kamp, staged at St. Ann’s Warehouse in Brooklyn in the first week of June, by a Dutch group called Hotel Modern, was weirdly gripping. The camp was presented as a room-sized model made of paper and cardboard. All the notorious landmarks were there: the Arbeit Macht Frei gate to Auschwitz itself, the barracks of Birkenau, the extermination camp nearby, the gas chambers, the watchtowers, the SS casino (where the Germans relaxed after a hard day’s work), the railway ramp, the appelplatz, where prisoners were made to stand for hours and hours, in dusty heat and icy cold.

While one or two members of the theater group, comprising of Pauline Kalker, Arlène Hoornweg, and Herman Helle, would manipulate the bald, pale, emaciated puppets—falling out of the trains, slurping the last drops of their watery soup, being worked to death, beaten to death, shoved into the gas chamber, cleaning out the gas chamber—another filmed this daily camp routine, as though he were a news cameraman, permanently on hand to record what was happening and project it onto a screen. The finger-sized puppets have individual faces, like the 200 BC Chinese terracotta army in Xi’an, most of them frozen in expressions of terror reminiscent of an Edvard Munch painting. The SS men and guards, on the other hand, are expressionless cutouts from old photographs. In an odd way, they look more dead than their victims.

There is no dialogue in the piece, which is as much an art installation as a theater play, just sound effects, of the trains coming and going, of people aimlessly shoveling the earth, of steel doors clanking shut, of Zyklon B being funnelled into the gas chamber, of drunken SS men singing marching songs in the casino, of a truncheon beating a sick, exhausted slave worker over and over, until there is nothing left of him but a few broken sticks wrapped in a rag.

It works, I think, precisely because of the artificiality, the stylization of the performance. The details evoke reality, often to horrifying effect, without trying to mimic it. Puppets can seem more real than actors, because they leave more to our imagination. Stripped of his striped camp garb, the naked puppet becomes transparent, as he is pushed into the gas chamber with the others, looking terrifyingly vulnerable. No dialogue or action is needed to illustrate the atrocity of the scene. Actors can never reenact what happened in a place like Auschwitz, at least not realistically, because what happened cannot be recreated. The more we aim for a realistic portrayal of such extreme violence, the more likely we are to produce a form of kitsch.

Steven Spielberg’s film, Schindler’s List, demonstrates this. The terror seems most real when violence is not actually shown—for example, in the scene at the station, where sealed cattle trains stand idle for hours in the baking sun, while the people stuffed inside are dying of thirst. Remember the crass, beery laughter of the German officers when Schindler attempts to relieve the prisoners’ thirst by hosing water into the trains. This is effective. The cruelty is palpable and shocking, whereas the scene inside the gas chamber is not. Spielberg knew that he could not show an actual gassing; how could you possibly act that out? But when the gas chamber turns out to be a shower room, it feels both like a cop-out and, as it were, a scene too far.

The harder we try to show what cannot be shown, the more elusive reality often becomes. Some things must be left to our imagination, not because it allows us to share the experience of real victims, for that, thankfully, we cannot do, but because a poem, or an oblique image, a faded photograph, a discarded suitcase, a child’s broken toy, or a plasticine puppet, can jolt our emotions by suggestion, which somehow is more effective than attempts at direct portrayal.

Much has been written and said about Adorno’s famous declaration that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric.” I don’t think he meant that no poems should ever be written after the killing. A more likely interpretation of his dictum is that barbarism, of which Auschwitz was the purest example, cannot be the stuff of poetry. There is no poetic meaning to be culled from exterminating millions of people. In fact, there is no meaning in it at all. To call the victims of Nazi mass murder “martyrs,” as is common in the language of Holocaust remembrance in Israel and elsewhere, is to give their deaths a higher meaning. They did not die for their beliefs, after all, or for a cause. (Being born Jewish is neither a belief nor a cause.) Part of the horror of what happened is that innocent people were killed for no reason at all. Auschwitz was a murder factory. Killing was a routine.

Martyrdom also implies that people have a choice in the matter. Christian martyrs, or indeed Muslim suicide bombers, are called martyrs by their communities because they were willing to die for their beliefs. But the fact that victims in the Holocaust had no choice does not mean that they were no longer human. The best accounts of the death camps, in fiction and non-fiction, by authors such as Primo Levi and Imre Kertesz, show that even under the most extreme circumstances human agency is never entirely extinguished. Primo Levi hinted at that, albeit darkly, when he insisted that the best people rarely survived. Survival was a matter of luck, but also of knowing how and when to take care of yourself—and only yourself. When Kertesz, author of Fateless, returned to his native Budapest from Auschwitz and Buchenwald, well-meaning people commiserated by saying he must have gone through hell. It was not hell, he would reply, but a camp made and inhabited by people. And he was not just a passive victim, or some abstract denizen of an imaginary place, but an adolescent, who happened to grow up in Buchenwald. He did not mean to diminish the dreadfulness of that experience, but he wanted people to see that it was still an experience that he lived through. Kertesz insisted on his autonomy, such as it was, precisely because his tormentors had tried everything to take it away from him.

This is why the most successful accounts of the Holocaust have been witness accounts. They restore individuality, they give the victims faces and voices. The alternative is to use suggestion. Poetry—pace Adorno—is ideally suited to this. And so is the kind of performance put on at St. Ann’s Warehouse, where the beating to death of a plasticine figure evoked precisely the barbarism that Adorno thought was beyond the bounds of art.

16-06-2010

When the Nazis invaded Holland in May of 1940, Pauline Kalker’s grandfather, Joseph Emanuel, who was Jewish, went into hiding. He moved from house to house, evading the Nazis for several months. But soon he was caught. The Nazis tortured him for three days, hoping to get information about where other Jews were hiding, but he did not crack. “They broke his nose and some ribs, but he didn’t say anything,” Kalker said recently. The Nazis allowed him to recover in a hospital, though soon after he was healthy he was transported to Auschwitz. He died a month later, on Oct. 1, 1943.

Kalker never met her grandfather, but said in a phone interview, “I was curious about who my grandfather was. I wanted to be with him.” To that end, she and her theater company, Hotel Modern, based in Holland, created the miniature theater show Kamp, which opens at St. Ann’s Warehouse, New York, this Wednesday night.

The show features a model of Auschwitz, complete with 3,500 finger-length inmates, and depicts the camp’s routine, gruesome events — beatings, gassings, cremations and starvations. The Holocaust is “so big,” said Kalker, “that you can’t tell the whole thing. But we felt that in miniature theater you could tell it on a much bigger scale.”

For the show, originally created in 2005, Herman Helle, the visual artist in the company, hired 10 local Dutch artists to build a near-exact model of Auschwitz. Helle undertook an intense research campaign, which included a visit to the camp, a viewing of several documentaries, and the study of camp blueprints, including its gas showers and ovens.

“Sometimes it was strange,” said Helle. “At a certain point, I was looking at the gas chambers [the Nazis built] and thought to myself, ‘That’s not the smartest way to build it.’ Then I caught myself, and said, ‘My God, I’m improving the gas chambers in a way.’”

During the show, which lasts just under an hour and plays through Sunday, several company actors film the action live. The footage is projected on a giant screen behind center stage, where the audience can see the actors moving the tiny figurines and filming. Though there is no dialogue and no real plot, the intricate documentation of how Auschwitz functioned, Kalker said, is drama enough. “We wanted to show the machine working,” she said. “That’s the dramatic thing — that it existed. People did this.”

But does the sweeping diorama come at too steep a price? Are the victims again made anonymous? When asked this, Helle said he did not think so. The company debated whether to focus on a few characters with a more traditional storyline, but decided against it. The nature of toy theater, he said, seemed to make any specific characters appear contrived — too cute, even. “It wasn’t sincere,” he said. “You see a character being beaten to death by a bodyguard, and that’s as close to an individual character as you get.” Still, the individuality of the inmates was not lost: “You zoom onto the faces and you realize that it’s about human beings,” he added.

Since all 3,500 figures are created by hand — their bodies made from simple wire covered in striped fabric, their heads from hand-rolled bits of clay — each one appears unique when projected on screen. You notice that each face, even in its abstract form — two poked holes for eyes, a sliced line for the mouth — is actually quite different. “People find it very real,” Helle said.

Contemporary toy theater often plays in the surreal mode (you could imagine Tim Burton having a field day with it), so the realism of Kamp was strangely refreshing, said Susan Feldman, the artistic director of St. Ann’s Warehouse. “I’ve been there, to Auschwitz and Birkenau,” Feldman said, adding how life-like Hotel Modern’s production seemed. “In Kamp, you see the daily life of what happened there, whereas a lot of the time [in theater based on Auschwitz] that’s just background.”

St. Ann’s Warehouse has a long history of staging both miniature (or “toy”) theater, as well as puppetry. “It’s been part of [St. Ann’s] DNA since the beginning,” Feldman said. (While toy theater and puppet theater are different, both, in essence, use props as characters, and theater directors often bundle them on the same bill.) In 1980, the year the venue opened, Feldman invited the renowned puppet company Bread and Puppet to stage a work. Since then, as toy and puppet theater has become increasingly prominent (think “Avenue Q” and Basil Twist), she’s added new companies to her roster almost every year.

Kamp is in fact one of several miniature theater performances being staged in this year’s ninth annual International Toy Theater Festival, which runs at St. Ann’s through June 13. But Kalker said that she herself avoids the name “toy”. To her, it diminishes the seriousness of her work. “We never use that word,” she said. “We find that the power of using models is that you can do really big themes.”

Kamp is not Hotel Modern’s only miniature work either. The company, founded by Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg, both actresses, in 1997, made its first miniature show in 1999. After creating several avant-garde plays, the addition of Helle to the company inspired them to try something even more radical. Helle had a side career making models for prominent architects, including Rem Koolhaas, and proposed a show based on the workings of a modern-day city. City Now was the result, and since then, they’ve made four other miniature-style shows, including Kamp.

The novelty and intricacy of their miniature work has made Hotel Modern wildly popular. But Kamp was the first show to deal with such a charged subject, and occasionally audiences have not been pleased. Helle recalled a performance in Germany not long ago, in which a Q&A was held with the directors after the show. “One person got up and said angrily, ‘It’s a banalization of the Holocaust. It’s kitsch.’”

But Helle said that most of the audience seemed to disagree, finding the show deeply compelling. He reasons now that the intense negative reaction — which he’s only experienced in Germany — probably had a lot to do with that fact. “It’s still a very difficult subject to discuss there,” he said.

There have been other memorable reactions, too. Kalker remembered the first time her own father and aunt saw Kamp, in 2005. As children, both also went into hiding when the Nazis invaded Holland, but were separated from each other and their father, Joseph Emanuel, during the war years. Neither went to a concentration camp, only finding out about their father’s death after the war was over.

Kalker recalled seeing tears come down her father and aunt’s faces as the show came to a close. “My father and his sister,” Kalker said, “had never really grieved together after their father died. They did not talk about it when they grew up, and they could never give him a proper funeral either.” For them, she thought, this must have been something quite like one.

01-06-2010

They have already made a performance about the First World War. They have now turned their attention to Auschwitz. Using 3000 puppets. ‘It’s up to us to to tell the story now, not the old people any more.’

Music can be heard, and a small marching band comes into view. Slowly, the camera zooms in on the tuba doing its level best to play Strauss’ Radetzky March. After a short while, the orchestra disappears but the music blares on. It no longer sounds cheerful. Men in prison stripes are pushed into the yard through the entrance emblazoned with the words Arbeit macht frei. It is roll call in Auschwitz.

‘An intravenous camera would be handy,’ says Herman Helle as he gasps for breath. For at least fifteen minutes he has been shuffling around his scale model -squatting – with camera and cables. Along the barracks, the huts, the old crematorium, the new crematorium being constructed, and back once more, through masses of people (living and dead), past the watchtower to the entrance in front of the word STOJ, halt.

Herman Helle is a big man but somehow he easily slips from view. You see the camp on the stage, you see the meticulously filmed images of it that Helle is making, and that are projected on the rear screen. This new performance by the Rotterdam theatre group Hotel Modern is physically gruelling. It is the first time the group do stomach muscle exercises every morning. But that is hardly the most important thing. The most important thing is Kamp, the project that has occupied them day and night for seven months.

It is unmistakably in Hotel Modern style. For the past nine years, visual artist Herman Helle (1953) and theatre makers Pauline Kalker (1968) and Arlene Hoornweg (1969) have been making their trademark, original form of theatre in which film, visual art, mime and music play equal parts, and scale models and puppets reflect the world and its inhabitants. They call it ‘live animation’. All three members are continually present on stage during the performance – usually as manipulators: they have everything – strings, cables, cameras – under control.

In City Now they portrayed life in a big city, in Snail Trails they explored the mind of an Alzheimer sufferer, and last season they presented the inferno of 9/11 in The Man with Five Fingers. They established their name in 2001 with The Great War, a performance about the First World War.

‘The audience chuckles [and] is also deeply impressed,’ wrote reviewers, and, ‘This is the only style appropriate for making the unimaginable bearable.’ They are still performing it throughout Europe – next month in Poland.

And now it is Auschwitz’ turn. Kamp. The words ‘The performance contains shocking images’ are printed on the flyer. And it is true. But there are also beautiful, impressive, quiet images. As the flyer itself illustrates with its photo of a camp prisoner with an overly large shovel in his hands. It looks like it would require enormous strength to lift and use it. Hotel Modern made another three thousand puppets just like it. More even. And each powerfully expressive, even among so many others. And with, remarkably enough, undiminished individuality.

After the rehearsal in the Studio in Rotterdam, the three members explain how it took a long time before they dared to really take it on, to tackle this emotionally charged theme of genocide, this disaster of biblical proportions, this historical drama, this true story. They read up on it, discussed, researched. And they doubted, cried and dawdled. They parried sceptical reactions (there were more than enough of those) and did it nonetheless.

But before this there was a ‘prologue’ incorporated into The Man with Five Fingers, which consisted of short episodes. The camp episode was a short one, a tribute to Josef Emanuel Kalker, a mild-mannered Jewish man and an able general practitioner, who went into hiding but was betrayed and had to clean toilets in Auschwitz’ medical barracks. He died one month after his arrival on 1 October 1943. He was Hotel Modern member Pauline Kalker’s grandfather.

The concept for Kamp preceded even the plan for the abovementioned episode. But with it, the step towards the realisation of CAMP seemed smaller. ‘That’s when we made our first barrack,’ says Hoornweg, and Kalker adds, ‘Our performances often begin with form.’

Helle: ‘In The Great War, the audience, for the most part, watches a film. A film we make, – right there and then. So all the scenes are rigged up on the table and then we point the camera at it. We want to do it differently in this one: you should look at the camp itself too. It’s impossible to make models of everything – the complex is too large for that. This is an amalgamation of Auschwitz and Birkenau. The first question was: What has to be in it? And so everyone made lists. Eating, sleeping, working, a train arrives, people sweep. On first impressions you could think you were watching a village with tidy inhabitants – a lot of clearing up went on in Auschwitz. And then the perspective shifts and we see the roll call, the gallows, gas chambers.

There are no lines spoken. But there are sounds. Kalker: ‘We thought long and hard about sound,’ says Kalker, ‘Thought about silence too. We don’t want to use people’s screams. ‘No! That’s kitsch, or plain wrong,’ concurs Hoornweg, and that wouldn’t evoke the feeling anyway.’ A little later Hoornweg adds, ‘It’s impossible for us to grasp the full horror, too. It’s the abyss of the human soul.’ Before they had even begun they was subjected to reactions characterised by reservations and mistrust: ‘Do you really think you should?’; ‘We’ve heard it all
before’; ‘I suppose it’ll be sentimental’; ‘The subject matter is far too heavy for a performance.’ Kalker: ‘It really upset me. It seems like denial, doesn’t it? Helle: ‘People are scared of it.’ Hoornweg: ‘I have to take a deep breath sometimes, that’s true. But I see it as ‘historical repertoire’. Six million dead, and only 60 years ago. The holocaust is a benchmark, it changed the way we look at war, at genocide, at humankind. “Never again” everyone said. Unfortunately it’s all too topical. Universal.’

A silence descends.
Helle: ‘I never thought “Why am I doing this?” I always felt the need to do it.’
Kalker: ‘Why’s that?’
Helle: ‘Because it happened.’
Hoornweg: ‘And because you should remember it.’
Kalker: ‘Yes. That is important. As far as I’m concerned, people really don’t have to think about Auschwitz every day, but – well yes, it’s up to people themselves what they think. But it’s important to me to – literally and figuratively – hold what happened up to the light. And, as theatre makers, to share that with your audience. It’s just that it’s also very scary. Because what you’re sharing with each other is horrible. That makes it more tense than previous performances in a different way.’
A momentary pause and then ‘Until now I’ve only sucked the story in through books, film, TV. I’ve been in Auschwitz-Dachau. Now I feel the need to pass on what I’ve found out. I feel responsible. We should tell the story now, not the old people any more
Hoornweg: ‘Tell stories about the world we live in. A true story, heard from people who lived through it.’
They had extensive conversations with five survivors. Nonetheless, it turned out to be difficult to get a good overall view. As Helle says, ‘Every book or document said something different. Survivors said different things. Because the camp was divided in lots of sections, and nobody left his allotted terrain, nobody knew what was going on three stretches of barbed wire away. So, yes, it was a long time before we had any idea of the complete picture.’

The scale model was already pretty much complete when they decided to go to Auschwitz. ‘It was me in particular that needed to go,’ explains Helle, ‘We’d looked in books, photos, documentaries, drawings, ground plans. You couldn’t help getting the feeling like “I’m reworking pictures. I’m trying to imagine things, but it exists. It’s there. I have to go there. I have to know to be able to imagine it.”‘ Their conversations with survivors echoed in their minds. They had said matter-of¬factly ‘Oh, then as you go through the gate look to the right and you’ll see my barrack.’ ‘By then we knew where your grandfather had been,’ says Helle. ‘Yes, I found that out,’ adds Kalker, ‘”Overwhelming” doesn’t really do it justice. But it was also a strange experience, in a way.’ Kalker: ‘The scale model!’ Helle: ‘I’d made it from photos, with a feeling like “That’s how it must have been.”‘ And then you get there, and it’s just standing there. A gigantic great scale model. Absolutely astonishing. “It’s right. We got it right after all!” Bizarre.’ Kalker: ‘But gradually…’ Helle: ‘Sooner.
Kalker: ‘The scale model isn’t the issue any more.’ Helle: ‘It beat the scale model.’

After their return they were joined by a team of puppet makers, and this helped during dark days. ‘We could share our sense of dislocation,’ explains Hoornweg, ‘You thought “What a mad enterprise” sometimes. Making all those puppets. And then again, the real situation was far more insane: all those puppets represent all those people! That was a link that kept returning. And a good thing it did too.’

‘So you don’t become completely alienated from the subject and fall into the trap of just having a nice time tinkering around and being sociable,’ adds Helle, ‘Because making the models is great fun. But sooner or later the moment comes [fingersnap]: three thousand puppets. Yes. And 1.2 million people were killed here – we have to represent that on a massive scale. We’re not the mad ones.’ They are lying on the stage floor, in the dressing-room, there is a box of extra parts on the table; everywhere you look there are tiny puppets, three or four inches high. ‘You start with a wire frame figure, you dress it, with pieces of material,’ explains Helle, ‘and then you make it dirty, with ash, a burn here and there. The whole getup has to be shabby, filthy.’ ‘Marmite,’ interjects Kalker, ‘that stains well.’ ‘And then the head.’ Each one different from the others.

‘Do you have enough dead people?’; ‘Do you know where they have to lie?’; ‘Herman, can you help me lay the bodies?’: they have become familiar, routine questions.’Can you have a look how many SS men you need?’ Right from the outset, Hoornweg was determined she would not reach that point. ‘But after a while, it’s true, you’re just occupied with the practical side of things and you just talk that way about bodies. You go on tour with the performance. The whole thing has to be well organised, that’s what we told each other. Selecting. The figures. And they had to be numbered, don’t forget. Each one had a number. Dear God, what a weird parallel. Not to be too holier-than-thou about it, though. I mean we’re talking about a theatre performance here. A performance about something that happened in the past, something that will be there for ever, and is gone forever.’ ‘Sometimes I’m shooting something with the camera,’ adds Helle, ‘and I think “Damn, that’s it: everyone knows that image”. A fragment, a photo stored in the collective memory. It doesn’t even have to be from Auschwitz. A universal image of conflict, of a person in distress. An image like that strikes home.’ ‘We try to astonish’, says Hoornweg ‘A particular way of looking at something you thought was familiar – so you truly see it afresh. It’s got a lot to do with the playfulness of the puppets, they’re also sort of ungainly. In the performance one of them gets beaten with a stick in a certain way and you think “That looks a bit clunky” but at the same time you realise that someone’s being beaten to a pulp.’That works well as theatre I think. You sit there watching this pixie world that relates in surprising ways to knowledge you already have.’ And Kalker adds, ‘I think the very nature of the performance allows you to take a certain distance from it.’

‘Sometimes you’re looking over someone’s shoulder, and then you’re suddenly among the people or you see the camp from a distance. The changing perspective gives you the feeling of having a bird’s eye view, it gives you depth without the oppressive atmosphere ever becoming suffocating. ‘You can identify with different people by turns,’ says Helle. And Hoornweg adds, ‘We don’t use words, either. We felt that that was the most potent in the end. You don’t hear what anyone thinks or feels and that means that as an audience member you remain an observer. A silent witness.’

10-11-2005

Auschwitz. Originally only the name of a peaceful village, but after the Second World War synonymous with the hell people are able to create for each other. How can you make a piece of theatre about it, you wonder.

Hotel Modern have succeeded. They’ve recreated the camp in miniature on stage, and populated it with thousands of miniature people: puppets in concentration camp and SS uniforms. You experience one day in the camp. You have a birds-eye view, and because all the events are filmed close up with a hand-held camera, and the images are projected on the back wall of the stage, at the same time you’re face to face with the leading actors, puppets eight centimetres tall.

There are no words. You do hear a wide range of sounds: the train, the birds, the hammering and sweeping of the prisoners, and the endless, endless, endless rain of blows with which an exhausted man is beaten to death.

The members of theatre group Hotel Modern, Pauline Kalker, Arlene Hoornweg and Herman Helle, move calmly among the buildings, like demigods, invisible to the tiny people. They move the puppets using long, thin sticks. One sweeps the camp. From a distance you see how big it is, how desolate. How hopeless the task is. Sweep, sweep, sweep. Sweep, sweep, sweep. From close up you see him labouring. Sweep, sweep, sweep. The gods put him in another part of the camp. Sweep, sweep, sweep. You know there’s no end to it, until death strikes.

The entire production is similarly imbued with the real horrors. There is no attention for what we, well-fed outsiders, assume to be the most important things: the red glow from the chimneys, the shouting, the dogs. There is no sensationalism. Here the horrors of death and tedium rule, of massive scale and denial of the individual. Occasionally something threatens to make you laugh: for example, when you see groups of prisoners are mounted in dozens on boards. But then you suddenly realise this shows exactly how the people were treated: not as people, but as a group of nameless bodies. Sometimes you get bored, for example when to the cheerful and banal strains of the Radetzky March, board after board after board after board, prisoners are pushed through the gate with Arbeit macht frei. It goes on and on. There’s no end to it. But that, you suddenly think, was exactly what happened. It went on and on. Monotonously. Mechanically. When the boards are then piled up and taken into the camp, and here and there put underneath a barracks like a piece of cheese under a cover, it might seem funny for three seconds. But again you immediately understand that’s how it went. Not literally, but in essence.

And there’s more. The almost transparent bodies of naked people, the piles of shoes and clothes, the heaps of bones, the hungry eyes and the sound of the food bowls being endlessly licked clean. The drunken parties of the SS soldiers. The lonely person in the night who ends his suffering by throwing himself onto the electrified fence. The hangings. The man who drops the Zyklon B into the chute. The way the cans are stacked, as they would be in reality, some of them upside down. The work of real people. The gas chambers, and the prisoner who mops the floor between “loads”. The squeaking as prisoners slide the bodies of their fellow prisoners into the ovens. Body on bier. Bier forwards. Oven door open. Body inside. Oven door shut. Bier back. Body on bier. Bier forwards… Auschwitz.

The following day I have to go to Rotterdam again, my hometown. I cross the square in front of the station, which is now a huge building site. I only know Rotterdam as a building site. After all, the heart of it was bombed. There’s sand on the ground. A young man is sweeping. When he sees me, he stops. He comes up to me and says, “I’m really doing my best, you know!” “I can see,” I reply. Later I see a documentary about concentration camps. A survivor says his father was given a job at the camp he was in. He had to sweep barracks. There is a metre-and-a-half of Auschwitz on my bookshelf. I know you can’t know what it was like there. But now I do know better. And a man with a broom will never just be a man with a broom to me again.

February 2007

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

Toys: a train, houses, puppets. You see it with your own eyes yet you do not want to believe it. Your first reaction is denial: this is not a concentration camp. But it is. There is no avoiding the fact. The entire stage of the theater is covered with barracks, watchtowers, barbed wire and searchlights. The end of a railway line, a gateway with the words ‘Arbeit macht frei’ in illuminated letters, and loudspeakers blaring out ‘Die Fahne hoch’. Hotel Modern act out a day in the camp.

Logistically and technically this is a hugely complex performance; Hotel Modern do not merely sketch, they meticulously describe in detail. Thousands of puppets must be moved hither and thither: from the trains, to work, to rollcall and to the barracks. And along the way, tiny cameras zoom in to show daily life in hell.

The result is bewildering, almost perversely so. As long as one views this swarming from a distance, the illusion can be maintained that this is merely some kind of children’s game. But when images of these tiny puppets are projected lifesize onscreen, their faces twisted in fearful grimaces, it becomes horrifyingly real.

The only thing it lacks, thank God, is the infernal racket – the screaming, the barking, the cacophonies in the barracks. Hotel Modern spare us that oppression: the ultimate sense of being hounded and having no refuge. Instead they let us hear mechanical sounds such as the piercing metal-on-metal squeak made by the carts used to load the ovens, accenting the loneliness of all those de-individualised puppets.

An execution: first the area around the gallows is swept, then the unwilling spectators arrive, followed by the condemned. And then, as witnessed by the camera, the hanging itself. The stage set, the toy barbed wire and the tiny buildings, grow to terrifying proportions and the lighting makes the dangling puppets even more disquieting.

The train arrives. We see a flat roof on which stand drums with skulls on their labels. A puppet empties them through a hole. Puppets pick out clothing. Puppets carrying off other puppets. And so on.

This is a disturbing and challenging performance, and not only because of the subject matter. It is all but impossible to reconcile such a dark and weighty theme with the obviously immense devotion that drove the creation and detailing of these handmade puppets. There is also the impassiveness that characterises the three performers’ silent and determined efforts to bring the events to life. This is alienating and sinister. In its efficiency it recalls the way in which a concentration camp was run. But it results in a cruelly beautiful performance that clamps itself to the memory.

01-02-2006

The theatre group Hotel Modern depicts the suffering in Auschwitz using puppets made of clay and wire. ‘The reality can’t be recreated, but the enormity can.’

Above the entrance gate, in bold letters, are the words Arbeit macht frei (Freedom through work). The Rotterdam-based theatre company Hotel Modern created a replica of Auschwitz for the performance Kamp. The hundred square metre scale model covers the floor of the group’s rehearsal studio. Herman Helle, Arlene Hoornweg and Pauline Kalker crawl on hands and knees through the miniature concentration camp, among barracks and barbed wire, watchtowers and an arriving train. ‘Play the swallows,’ calls Kalker to the sound technician. Against a quiet aural backdrop, the gentle warbling of birds can be heard. Kalker nods, thinking. ‘Touching – those sweet sounds while you see people being driven into the sheds.’

The sounds were recorded at Auschwitz while the makers were walking around there. There is no speech in the performance: sounds such as these are all one hears. And the people are not the actors on the stage but only puppets made of wire, fabric and clay. Puppets as small as a finger and almost as slender. A hundred guards and almost four thousand prisoners. Some are lying white and naked in a heap: these have already died. Others are standing for roll call in long, drab rows. They are pinned in their tens to sheets of cardboard, and these are pushed quickly from place to place. Tiny cameras zoom in on the puppets or glide like aeroplanes over the scale model, making these tiny mortals creatures seem even more insignificant.

The actors operate the cameras themselves. They follow the victims until their very last moments. ‘After the camera’s gone to black in the gas chamber,’ explains Kalker to Helle and Hoornweg, ‘you go to the SS officer looking through the peephole.’ Cautious hands manoeuvre through the vaulted space of a kneehigh building and stop at a door. The SS officer who has just spied on the dying people looks into the camera. Impudently and a little hazily, as if intoxicated.

Few theatre performances have been made about the camp that was built specifically to destroy its inhabitants. At least about the horrors that took place in the camp rather than before or after. ‘Auschwitz is still suppressed,’ says Kalker when the rehearsal is over. ‘Of course that’s understandable. But if you truly want to understand mankind you have to look at the grim reality at some point. I don’t think it’s crass to depict the gas chambers. I think it’s crass to deny them. You do the victims an injustice if you don’t show the whole truth.’ Kalker, whose grandfather died in Auschwitz, says, ‘He will never know of my existence. But I still have to do this for him. I have to know what it was like there.’ Of course, a representation on stage will always fall short of reality. ‘On the one hand you have two stay as realistic as possible,’ says visual artist Helle, ‘You can’t just invent things. But on the other hand that realism should avoid the finickiness of a model train set. That’s why we use a lot of course materials like cardboard boxes and grey wrapping paper.’ Hoornweg interjects suddenly, ‘The reality can’t be recreated, but the enormity can. Because the audience has an overview of the entire grounds from their seat, sees how the murder is organised. It sees the death factory. ‘

Are there, then, absolutely no characters in Kamp, no individual adventures? ‘Yes, there are,’ says Kalker, ‘A man commits suicide in the barbed wire. A woman being driven into the gas chamber resists. You need to identify with them otherwise you wouldn’t be able to make them convincing. You even have to identify with a peeping SS officer, otherwise it loses credibility.’ ‘How did the perpetrators see the Jews?,’ asks Helle, ‘The same way I see a street whore? With instinctive repugnance? They were sick, they were lousy, they stank. That creates indifference straight away. And if you can’t empathise, and you drink, you can murder.’

Hotel Modern does not only present ugliness though. ‘If you pile horror upon horror,’ says Kalker, ‘you break the audience’s spirit. There must also be a place for beauty.’ Is there not a danger that this will be tasteless? Hoornweg explains, ‘It’s the extras in films like Schindler’s List that are tasteless. The makeup is so obvious, and the costumes. Our puppets are so obviously fake that they actually become more real than those extras. They’re not in the least bit glamorous. There’s something naked about them, something vulnerable.’ They don’t speak because then it would be too much like a puppet show. ‘They all have their own aura, and that makes them believable. If you let them speak they lose their credibility.’ Pauline Kalker hares across the scale model and picks up one of the cardboard sheets. ‘Here, the Auschwitz orchestra, it really existed.’ One figure is playing violin, the other clarinet, one looks glum, the other cheerful: each puppet is different. ‘Because they were all made with love, all these puppets of ours, we avoid the trap of cynicism. Cynicism obstructs feelings. But I hope that the audience will understand what genocide is, not only one a rational level but also on an instinctive level. We’ve got nothing new to tell people who were in Auschwitz. But perhaps we’ll be able to tell something new to people who weren’t in Auschwitz.’

12-11-2005

The stage leaves nothing to the imagination: to the left, barracks behind barbed wire; to the right, officers quarters with the gate decorated with the letters spelling out ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’; and centre stage, the end of the railway line.

The scale model of Auschwitz concentration camp is kneehigh, the prisoners and guards are small wire puppets the size of a carrot.

The three members of Hotel Modern theatre company – visual artist Herman Helle and the actresses Pauline Kalker and Arlene Hoornweg – move over and around the buildings. The puppets are shifted about, arranged for a colossal roll call; with the help of string and wooden strips they move wheelbarrows, trucks roll by, and sand is shoveled with implements smaller than the smallest teaspoon.

But still one can see precisely what the hundreds of finely detailed puppets are doing; stooping or kneeling, Helle films their activities with a finger camera and the scenes are projected on the rear wall.

Stage left, smeared as if with burnt human fat, there already stands a cardboard crematorium. Apparently though, this furnace does not suffice, and directly behind it a second is being built: pulleys pay out string and pull a second chimney upright with a thud. ‘Well that’s that done then’ might have been a suitable line here, but not a word is spoken in the puppet theatre and animation film Kamp. In an earlier piece, The Great War, Hotel Modern depicted in theatrical miniature the horrors of the trenches during the 1914-18 war. The grandfather of actress and designer Pauline Kalker was murdered in Auschwitz. ‘He’ll never know I exist’, says Kalker, ‘but I must do this for him, I must know what it was like there.’

Without fuss and without a scintilla of pretence, the camera and the finger tips are right there when the mini prisoners (many dressed formally) arrive with the last train, are gassed, and pushed into the ovens one after the other just as artillery shells are shoved into a cannon.

The playfulness of the puppetry is drenched in rage from the outset: hollow-eyed and with contorted mouths, the tiny victims walk jerkily to their death. Although the manner in which puppetry and film balance each other is both subtle and ingenious, it is the scale model itself that tells the most powerful story. Together with the scarcely audible nightbird song when, but for the punt searchlights, the cardboard concentration camp is enveloped in utter silence and darkness.

17-11-2005

That millions of people were murdered in Auschwitz, systematically, on a production line, is not news to anyone. Murdered by people. Neither is the fact that the organisation was a perfectly oiled machine, a 24-hour business, working on, day and night. We know it, however unimaginable that is. We have seen the images. The members of Hotel Modern have seen them too. And they decided to make a performance about it: Kamp.

What on earth can one do to add to all that is already known about this abominable subject? They made thousands of tiny puppets and built an enormous scale model of a concentration camp that looks like Auschwitz: the infamous gate with Arbeid macht frei lit up like a neon sign, the accurately re-created barracks, the parade ground, the watchtowers, the barbed wire, the crematorium. And the second crematorium under construction. Each detail gives expression to the dedication with which all this has been created. Not a word is spoken. We hear only the sounds: the birds, the train, the trucks that transport the clothing and suitcases of the gas victims to the dumping ground, and the shots. A certain distance is created by the fact that we can observe the makers at work: moving the ranks of puppets, pushing the train and manipulating the figures. A small camera is regularly used to zoom in on details. The images thus created closely resemble the few photos we are familiar with: black-and-white and sometimes out of focus. Slowly, the camera passes along seemingly endless multitudes of prisoners. Both this vastness and the close-ups created a pitiful scene. Eyes like black holes, fearful, bewildered faces, living skeletons.

We observe them as they go about their daily lives. From early morning – when the camp is still quiet and deserted and a rattling cart enters the gate – until deep in the night -when the lights are turned on, searchlights probe the air, someone is electrocuted on the barbed wire and the victims from yet another train are sent into the deadly gas chamber.

For an hour, we are actually watching visual art. The absence of text accentuates the experience of an installation. But there is action. And it is precisely the awkwardness of the method by which this is achieved – we can see the puppets being controlled using wires – that makes such an impact. Whether they are eating soup, shovelling the ashes of the dead or cleaning the train tracks. That they are not real people, but icons, ensures that this representation of their powerlessness transcends a mere reporting of events.

A man is beaten up by a guard; a fellow prisoner barely dares to look. And suddenly it dawns on one that it is also the shame of the survivors of such a hell that keeps them silent: the shame that they could do nothing for their companions, because they wanted to survive. More than ever, the human dilemma is evident here.

The makers have found a performance form that makes it possible to once again discuss this loaded subject. By raising the issue of the extremes to which people are able to go. With dignity. As they scurry about with the puppets, visible yet almost unnoticed, they remind one of children at play. Concentrated and enthralled by their game. It is this very self-abandonment that makes Kamp so impressive: sad and oppressive, but also authentic.

17-11-2005

Is such a thing possible: to portray the concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz using sand, paper, cardboard models of barracks and thousands of tiny puppets? It sounds like a completely ridiculous enterprise, almost blasphemous, and, what is more, entirely redundant. For why should a theatre performance about the horrors of Auschwitz be made at all?

Hotel Modern is a group of visual and theatrical artists. They have developed their own theatrical language using scale models and puppets, and a cheap video camera that moves among the models and projects images of the puppets onscreen as if they were lifesize. Using this technique they have already made performances about the First World War, the attack on the Twin Towers in New York and the war experiences of the father of one of the actresses (he evaded deportation by going into hiding). Sometimes the subject matter is lighter and less realistic, such as the love between a lady and a unicorn.

The group is neither sensationalist nor provocative. The members have a sincere and urgent need to tell the story of Auschwitz using their own means of expression, now there are increasingly few survivors of that city of death to bear witness. The performance I saw was sold out, and the theatre was full of young people sitting in deathly silence watching all those thousands of tiny puppets as they were manoeuvred between the barracks of Auschwitz and Birkenau. In this performance, called, simply, Kamp, we saw terrible things: three prisoners being hanged, a man being beaten to death with a shovel, the arrival of the train with Jews unaware of the fate that would befall them; men, women, children, the elderly, dressed in their finest clothes. Soon afterwards they disappear, naked, into the gas chamber. Their luggage remains standing on the platform.

Music blares out: the Radetzky march, played by the prisoner’s orchestra. Hundreds upon hundreds of prisoners march to their work through the gateway with ‘Arbeit macht frei’ above it. Each eight-centimetre-tall puppet has a different posture and expression. We see how the actors move the puppets forward. But we seem to see real prisoners labouring, suffering, dying. It remains difficult to continue watching the horrendous scenes before us, but because the methods are both primitive and ingenious we remain seated, fascinated.

It was a gargantuan task to make all these tiny puppets, and probably a far more dreadful task to perform the research – during which conversations were held with a number of Auschwitz survivors, including Lenie Boeken-Velleman and Hans Beckman. The interviewees sometimes had to answer unexpected and very concrete questions in order that the miniature Auschwitz could be closely modelled on the real one. Sometimes the choice was made to diverge from reality. In the performance, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau are in close proximity to make it possible to portray various aspects of life and death in the camp, and the motto Arbeit macht frei is in phosphorescent blue neon. Initially this seems very odd but perhaps it was done to show that it is not real; that it never can be real, no matter how hard one tries. Because Hotel Modern succeeds almost too well in pulling you into their rendering of Auschwitz.

01-01-2006

They have already made a performance about the First World War. They have now turned their attention to Auschwitz. Using 3000 puppets. ‘It’s up to us to to tell the story now, not the old people any more.’

Music can be heard, and a small marching band comes into view. Slowly, the camera zooms in on the tuba doing its level best to play Strauss’ Radetzky March. After a short while, the orchestra disappears but the music blares on. It no longer sounds cheerful. Men in prison stripes are pushed into the yard through the entrance emblazoned with the words Arbeit macht frei. It is roll call in Auschwitz.

‘An intravenous camera would be handy,’ says Herman Helle as he gasps for breath. For at least fifteen minutes he has been shuffling around his scale model -squatting – with camera and cables. Along the barracks, the huts, the old crematorium, the new crematorium being constructed, and back once more, through masses of people (living and dead), past the watchtower to the entrance in front of the word STOJ, halt.

Herman Helle is a big man but somehow he easily slips from view. You see the camp on the stage, you see the meticulously filmed images of it that Helle is making, and that are projected on the rear screen. This new performance by the Rotterdam theatre group Hotel Modern is physically gruelling. It is the first time the group do stomach muscle exercises every morning. But that is hardly the most important thing. The most important thing is Kamp, the project that has occupied them day and night for seven months.

It is unmistakably in Hotel Modern style. For the past nine years, visual artist Herman Helle (1953) and theatre makers Pauline Kalker (1968) and Arlene Hoornweg (1969) have been making their trademark, original form of theatre in which film, visual art, mime and music play equal parts, and scale models and puppets reflect the world and its inhabitants. They call it ‘live animation’. All three members are continually present on stage during the performance – usually as manipulators: they have everything – strings, cables, cameras – under control.

In City Now they portrayed life in a big city, in Snail Trails they explored the mind of an Alzheimer sufferer, and last season they presented the inferno of 9/11 in The Man with Five Fingers. They established their name in 2001 with The Great War, a performance about the First World War.

‘The audience chuckles [and] is also deeply impressed,’ wrote reviewers, and, ‘This is the only style appropriate for making the unimaginable bearable.’ They are still performing it throughout Europe – next month in Poland.

And now it is Auschwitz’ turn. Kamp. The words ‘The performance contains shocking images’ are printed on the flyer. And it is true. But there are also beautiful, impressive, quiet images. As the flyer itself illustrates with its photo of a camp prisoner with an overly large shovel in his hands. It looks like it would require enormous strength to lift and use it. Hotel Modern made another three thousand puppets just like it. More even. And each powerfully expressive, even among so many others. And with, remarkably enough, undiminished individuality.

After the rehearsal in the Studio in Rotterdam, the three members explain how it took a long time before they dared to really take it on, to tackle this emotionally charged theme of genocide, this disaster of biblical proportions, this historical drama, this true story. They read up on it, discussed, researched. And they doubted, cried and dawdled. They parried sceptical reactions (there were more than enough of those) and did it nonetheless.

But before this there was a ‘prologue’ incorporated into The Man with Five Fingers, which consisted of short episodes. The camp episode was a short one, a tribute to Josef Emanuel Kalker, a mild-mannered Jewish man and an able general practitioner, who went into hiding but was betrayed and had to clean toilets in Auschwitz’ medical barracks. He died one month after his arrival on 1 October 1943. He was Hotel Modern member Pauline Kalker’s grandfather.

The concept for Kamp preceded even the plan for the abovementioned episode. But with it, the step towards the realisation of CAMP seemed smaller. ‘That’s when we made our first barrack,’ says Hoornweg, and Kalker adds, ‘Our performances often begin with form.’

Helle: ‘In The Great War, the audience, for the most part, watches a film. A film we make, – right there and then. So all the scenes are rigged up on the table and then we point the camera at it. We want to do it differently in this one: you should look at the camp itself too. It’s impossible to make models of everything – the complex is too large for that. This is an amalgamation of Auschwitz and Birkenau. The first question was: What has to be in it? And so everyone made lists. Eating, sleeping, working, a train arrives, people sweep. On first impressions you could think you were watching a village with tidy inhabitants – a lot of clearing up went on in Auschwitz. And then the perspective shifts and we see the roll call, the gallows, gas chambers.

There are no lines spoken. But there are sounds. Kalker: ‘We thought long and hard about sound,’ says Kalker, ‘Thought about silence too. We don’t want to use people’s screams. ‘No! That’s kitsch, or plain wrong,’ concurs Hoornweg, and that wouldn’t evoke the feeling anyway.’ A little later Hoornweg adds, ‘It’s impossible for us to grasp the full horror, too. It’s the abyss of the human soul.’ Before they had even begun they was subjected to reactions characterised by reservations and mistrust: ‘Do you really think you should?’; ‘We’ve heard it all
before’; ‘I suppose it’ll be sentimental’; ‘The subject matter is far too heavy for a performance.’ Kalker: ‘It really upset me. It seems like denial, doesn’t it? Helle: ‘People are scared of it.’ Hoornweg: ‘I have to take a deep breath sometimes, that’s true. But I see it as ‘historical repertoire’. Six million dead, and only 60 years ago. The holocaust is a benchmark, it changed the way we look at war, at genocide, at humankind. “Never again” everyone said. Unfortunately it’s all too topical. Universal.’

A silence descends.
Helle: ‘I never thought “Why am I doing this?” I always felt the need to do it.’
Kalker: ‘Why’s that?’
Helle: ‘Because it happened.’
Hoornweg: ‘And because you should remember it.’
Kalker: ‘Yes. That is important. As far as I’m concerned, people really don’t have to think about Auschwitz every day, but – well yes, it’s up to people themselves what they think. But it’s important to me to – literally and figuratively – hold what happened up to the light. And, as theatre makers, to share that with your audience. It’s just that it’s also very scary. Because what you’re sharing with each other is horrible. That makes it more tense than previous performances in a different way.’
A momentary pause and then ‘Until now I’ve only sucked the story in through books, film, TV. I’ve been in Auschwitz-Dachau. Now I feel the need to pass on what I’ve found out. I feel responsible. We should tell the story now, not the old people any more
Hoornweg: ‘Tell stories about the world we live in. A true story, heard from people who lived through it.’
They had extensive conversations with five survivors. Nonetheless, it turned out to be difficult to get a good overall view. As Helle says, ‘Every book or document said something different. Survivors said different things. Because the camp was divided in lots of sections, and nobody left his allotted terrain, nobody knew what was going on three stretches of barbed wire away. So, yes, it was a long time before we had any idea of the complete picture.’

The scale model was already pretty much complete when they decided to go to Auschwitz. ‘It was me in particular that needed to go,’ explains Helle, ‘We’d looked in books, photos, documentaries, drawings, ground plans. You couldn’t help getting the feeling like “I’m reworking pictures. I’m trying to imagine things, but it exists. It’s there. I have to go there. I have to know to be able to imagine it.”‘ Their conversations with survivors echoed in their minds. They had said matter-of¬factly ‘Oh, then as you go through the gate look to the right and you’ll see my barrack.’ ‘By then we knew where your grandfather had been,’ says Helle. ‘Yes, I found that out,’ adds Kalker, ‘”Overwhelming” doesn’t really do it justice. But it was also a strange experience, in a way.’ Kalker: ‘The scale model!’ Helle: ‘I’d made it from photos, with a feeling like “That’s how it must have been.”‘ And then you get there, and it’s just standing there. A gigantic great scale model. Absolutely astonishing. “It’s right. We got it right after all!” Bizarre.’ Kalker: ‘But gradually…’ Helle: ‘Sooner.
Kalker: ‘The scale model isn’t the issue any more.’ Helle: ‘It beat the scale model.’

After their return they were joined by a team of puppet makers, and this helped during dark days. ‘We could share our sense of dislocation,’ explains Hoornweg, ‘You thought “What a mad enterprise” sometimes. Making all those puppets. And then again, the real situation was far more insane: all those puppets represent all those people! That was a link that kept returning. And a good thing it did too.’

‘So you don’t become completely alienated from the subject and fall into the trap of just having a nice time tinkering around and being sociable,’ adds Helle, ‘Because making the models is great fun. But sooner or later the moment comes [fingersnap]: three thousand puppets. Yes. And 1.2 million people were killed here – we have to represent that on a massive scale. We’re not the mad ones.’ They are lying on the stage floor, in the dressing-room, there is a box of extra parts on the table; everywhere you look there are tiny puppets, three or four inches high. ‘You start with a wire frame figure, you dress it, with pieces of material,’ explains Helle, ‘and then you make it dirty, with ash, a burn here and there. The whole getup has to be shabby, filthy.’ ‘Marmite,’ interjects Kalker, ‘that stains well.’ ‘And then the head.’ Each one different from the others.

‘Do you have enough dead people?’; ‘Do you know where they have to lie?’; ‘Herman, can you help me lay the bodies?’: they have become familiar, routine questions.’Can you have a look how many SS men you need?’ Right from the outset, Hoornweg was determined she would not reach that point. ‘But after a while, it’s true, you’re just occupied with the practical side of things and you just talk that way about bodies. You go on tour with the performance. The whole thing has to be well organised, that’s what we told each other. Selecting. The figures. And they had to be numbered, don’t forget. Each one had a number. Dear God, what a weird parallel. Not to be too holier-than-thou about it, though. I mean we’re talking about a theatre performance here. A performance about something that happened in the past, something that will be there for ever, and is gone forever.’ ‘Sometimes I’m shooting something with the camera,’ adds Helle, ‘and I think “Damn, that’s it: everyone knows that image”. A fragment, a photo stored in the collective memory. It doesn’t even have to be from Auschwitz. A universal image of conflict, of a person in distress. An image like that strikes home.’ ‘We try to astonish’, says Hoornweg ‘A particular way of looking at something you thought was familiar – so you truly see it afresh. It’s got a lot to do with the playfulness of the puppets, they’re also sort of ungainly. In the performance one of them gets beaten with a stick in a certain way and you think “That looks a bit clunky” but at the same time you realise that someone’s being beaten to a pulp.’That works well as theatre I think. You sit there watching this pixie world that relates in surprising ways to knowledge you already have.’ And Kalker adds, ‘I think the very nature of the performance allows you to take a certain distance from it.’

‘Sometimes you’re looking over someone’s shoulder, and then you’re suddenly among the people or you see the camp from a distance. The changing perspective gives you the feeling of having a bird’s eye view, it gives you depth without the oppressive atmosphere ever becoming suffocating. ‘You can identify with different people by turns,’ says Helle. And Hoornweg adds, ‘We don’t use words, either. We felt that that was the most potent in the end. You don’t hear what anyone thinks or feels and that means that as an audience member you remain an observer. A silent witness.’

10-11-2005