At the start of the play “Survivors” on April 20 at Springfield Township High School, Springfield Middle School Principal Zachary Fuller asked students not to use their phones. He asked. He did not tell. Nor did he collect the phones and put them into a box.
It is difficult to confiscate a piece of technology that to 200 middle school students is more like a limb. But once the show started, the students heeded his request.
Throughout the hour-long lesson on Holocaust history, portraying the stories of 10 survivors, not a phone was spotted or heard. The kids looked toward the stage and paid attention.
“I hope that they walk away with a greater sense of empathy for all of the survivors and victims of the Holocaust,” said Christina Photiades, an English teacher at Springfield Middle School.
Photiades was talking about the intended lesson for her students. But she also was describing the goal of the play’s distributors, Gratz College and Theatre Ariel. Between April 18 and 28, the Jewish college and salon theater staged the show in local school districts, like Abington, Lower Moreland and Lower Merion, around the area. Gratz estimated that 4,000 students saw the play.
“Survivors,” written by Wendy Kout, focuses on 10 people who settled in Rochester, New York, after World War II. Center Stage, a theater company in Rochester, created it with help from the Jewish Federation of Greater Rochester’s Center for Holocaust Awareness and Information.
As an email from Gratz explained, the play was commissioned because Holocaust memory might be fading. Survivors are dying. And a 2020 survey by the Claims Conference “indicated that 63% of American adults under 40 did not know that six million Jews were killed during the Shoah.”
A play can help fill that gap, according to Jesse Bernstein, artistic director of Theatre Ariel.
“By putting it into a story, it is a testament to the narrative that the survivors have, but it also engages the students in following the narrative in a dramatic way,” he said. “Those two combined helps give context and create empathy.”
After the show on April 20, Theatre Ariel’s actors took questions from students. Some were about the Holocaust.
“There aren’t that many survivors left. Are any of the ones you portrayed still alive?” asked one student.
“Sadly, all of the survivors we portray in the show have passed,” responded one of the actors. “But that’s why it’s even more important that we continue to tell these stories. These people aren’t around anymore to tell them themselves.”
“Why did Hitler commit suicide?” asked another student.
“As soon as he knew the war was over, he knew that he was going to have to pay for everything he had done,” answered one of the actors.
But during a half-hour question-and-answer session, only five students asked about the Shoah. Most of the kids who raised their hands inquired about acting in and producing a show. Photiades said they recently took a field trip to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. And leading up to that trip, Springfield’s history teachers focused on “the severity of the things they were going to learn about.” The English teacher thinks that “a lot of those questions happened in the classrooms, where they might have felt a little more comfortable asking a trusted adult.”
“So…I’m not entirely concerned,” she said, laughing a little.
The play tried to get in 10 stories in 60 minutes. It was hard to follow at times. It also raced through the rise of Hitler, his expansion through Europe, the Holocaust and World War II. But even if the storytelling was not perfect, it was worth a shot, according to Damian Johnston, the assistant superintendent of the School District of Springfield Township.
“Anytime we can have first-person accounts shared with students allows them an insight and a window into seeing a part of life that they did not experience themselves,” she said. “So, I’m excited for them to have the opportunity to learn and feel beyond something in print or the museum trip a few months ago.”
Earlier in April, Springfield High School hosted a speaker who was 98 years old and a survivor.
“That’s what the conversation actually was from the staff and from the students,” Johnston said. “When those stories are not available to us, what risk is there for us to not be able to learn and feel?” ■
