Performance lecture. A collage of wartime diaries.

Set design: Ivana Macková (guest)
Music: Katarína Máliková (guest)
Dramaturgy: Marián Pecko
Script, direction: Monika Kováčová, Marián Pecko

Cast: Anna Hajduková-Zemaníková, Eva Dočolomanská, Marianna Mackurová, Filip Štrba, Mária Šamajová

Lecturer: Viera Kováčová (guest)

Set and design production: the PTAC studio led by Katarína Mažáryová and Ivana Macková (guest)

Anna, Alja, Helga, and Tanja.
Four girls, aged 9 to 17, who experienced either the first or the second World War and left behind an authentic testimony in their journal entries.
Home, family, love, regime alternation, constant threat to their life.
Strong will and tenacity that don’t know age neither country.
Words that could not be uttered. Words that ought be heard.
Today. Everywhere. So the history does not go on repeating itself…

Anna Frank (1929, Frankfurt am Main, Germany – 1945, Bergen-Belsen, Germany). 
At her thirteen birthday, she got a red-and-white checked diary in which she recorded events of the 12th June 1942 to the 1st August 1944. When her 16 year old sister Margot received a summon to transportation in 1942, the entire family moved out to disused business premises, their prearranged hideout in Amsterdam, that Anna’s journal entries mark as the West Wing. Franks are later joined by the father’s associate Hermann van Pels and doctor Fritz Pfeffer. After hearing the Danish Radio Oranje’s appeal to people to provide their diaries to a postwar collection, Anna began rewriting her diary into a book. After more than 761 days, their hiding was discovered by the SS troops and all inhabitants of the West Wing were transported to a transit camp in Westerborg. They were taken away by the last Dutch transportation to Auschwitz. Anna’s diary was left behind in the hiding where Mep Gies, one of their servants, found it and hid it away.
In October 1944, Anna and Margot ended up in the Bergen-Belsen concetration camp that was plagued by a typhus epidemic. Anna, who was herself ill, cared for her sister until the end and died few days after her, in March 1945. Several weeks later, the concentration camp was liberated.
The only inhabitant of the West Wing to survive was Anna’s father Otto Frank.
Alja Rachmanovova, née Galina Džuraginova (1898, Kasli, Russia – 1991, Ettenhausen, Switzerland).
From an aristocratic family. She kept her first diary when 14 years old. After the fall of the Romanovov dynasty, she witnesses the civil war outbreak and onset of the Communist regime in Russia. She and her family flee, seeking refuge in Siberia, where she marries an Austrian war captive. Later on, already with a little son, they escape first to Wiena and then to Salzburg. In 1930s, Galina publishes her journals under a pseudonym in three volumes: Students, love, Cheka and death, Marriages in the red storm and Milkwoman from Ottakring. In 1945, Rachmanovova flees to Switzerland where she lives until the end of her days. Despite Alja’s journals becoming bestsellers right after their first release, they have not been yet translated to Russian.

Tatiana Nikolajevna Savichevova (25th January 1930, Gdov, Rusia – 1st July 1944, Šatki, Russia).
Together with her family, she found herself in Leningrad during the almost 900-days long German blockade in 1941. Tatiana, at that point only 11 years old, assisted at digging trenches and extinguishing petrol bombs. Her sister Nina managed to escape the besieged city, but did not have a time to leave any message to her family. Her relatives thought that she had died. As a remembrance of her sister, Tatiana got a notebook that later became her diary. The entries are only on 9 lines, containing name, date and time of death of her loved ones. Before then, she had kept another journal to record important events of every day, however, during the cruel winter of 1941, she was compelled to burn it when they ran out of everything that could be put into their little stove.
Fainted Tatiana was discovered in their apartment shortly after her relatives had died. She lived in a children’s home and later on was evacuated from besieged Leningrad together with other orphans. Due to tuberculosis infection, malnutrition and her poor mental state, she died in a hospital in the city of Shatki.

Helga Weiss (1929, Prague).
In 1941, she was together with her parents transported to the labour camp of Terezín. Along with her mom, she survived the concentration camp of Auschwitz, the labour camp of Freiberg and the concentration camp of Mauthausen. Pictures that she painted while in Terezín were published as a part of her diary. After the war, she returned to Prague and graduated from the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. As a pinter, she has exhibited her works all around the world and received several prestigious awards. She lives in Prague, in the same apartment where she was born.

Intenda Foundation and The best known war journals project
The Intenda Foundation primarily focuses on developing young-adults-friendly society through initiatives of and for young people (up to 35). The best known war journals project within which the lecture performance was produced is meant primarily for secondary and tertiary schools. It reacts to the sorrowful, but very current anniversary of both World Wars. Goal of the project is to direct public attention towards the memento and horrors of war, towards themes of superiority, various sorts of discrimination and intolerance and how these affect formation of an over-all social situation, as well as towards the never-ceasing necessity of defending democracy.

This performance was produced thanks to the financial support of the Intenda Foundation.

Photo: Dodo Šamaj
Running time: 105 min.
Opening night: 28/11/2014