Thousands of tiny puppets in Auschwitz

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