In February 1942, a 12-year-old girl escaped a Jewish ghetto in Nazi-occupied Belarus. A champion swimmer, she coated herself in goose fat and swam under ice to evade guards before fleeing into a nearby forest where she rendezvoused with her older sister, a partisan fighter.
Her daring escape is recounted in “The Empty Shell of War,” a new play by Belorussian playwright, filmmaker, and dissident Andrei Kureichik based on testimonies from Yale’s Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies.
Kureichik, exiled for his opposition to the authoritarian regime of Belorussian dictator Alexander Lukashenko, is playwright-in-residence at the Fortunoff Archive, which houses more than 4,400 video testimonies of witnesses of Nazi persecution, including survivors, bystanders, and liberators.
The play, which premieres Jan. 19 with a staged reading at Yale’s Slifka Center, was created through an artist residency program established by the Fortunoff Archive (which is a collection and program of Yale Library) to invite artists of various stripes to explore the testimonies for creative purposes.
“The testimonies are a primary source for scholarship and Holocaust education, but they’ve also been a source for documentaries and other creative works,” said Stephen Naron, the archive’s director. “Through our artists-in-residence program, writers, musicians, and visual artists can combine those research and educational components, creating works of public history that engage people who might not otherwise contemplate the Holocaust or think about the experiences of survivors and those who did not survive.”
Every story in the collection should have its moment. I’d like to see each taken off the shelf and used in some meaningful way.
Two other artists-in-residence are currently working in the archive: author and illustrator Nora Krug, who is conducting research for an illustrated non-fiction book based on the collection, and poet and musician Grzegorz Kwiatkowski, who aims to combine testimony, historical research, and his own artistic vision into a work that speaks to the enduring importance of remembering the atrocities of the Holocaust.
Additionally, the Fortunoff Archive recently released, “Shotn/Shadows,” the third volume in its “Songs from Testimonies” series in which Zisl Slepovitch, a musician-in-residence, locates poems and songs that are sung or recounted in testimonies, researches their origins, and arranges and records versions of them with his ensemble, featuring vocalist Sasha Lurje.
The ensemble will perform songs from the project’s three volumes at a concert on Jan. 23 at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The show serves as the closing event for “In the First Person: The Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies,” an exhibition at the Beinecke that contextualizes the archive’s work within the modern Jewish tradition of documenting anti-Jewish violence through eyewitness accounts.
The archive has a tradition of supporting creative engagement with the collection, Naron said, pointing to the dozens of documentaries, as well as works of art and literature, that have relied on testimonies or been inspired by them.
“All of these creative efforts are another means of unlocking and activating the collection and pushing it out into the public sphere,” he said. “Every story in the collection should have its moment. I’d like to see each taken off the shelf and used in some meaningful way.”
The Zisl Slepovitch Ensemble and vocalist Sasha Lurje performing songs drawn from testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive.
Finding sanctuary in New Haven
Kureichik, who has written more than 30 movies and TV films, arrived in New Haven in the summer of 2022 to participate in the Maurice R. Greenberg World Fellows Program, a four-month program at the Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs that allows talented, energetic people from across the globe the time and space to develop their skills and share their knowledge with the campus community.
Prior to coming to Yale, he had gained an international following as a political playwright for his activism in the wake of Belarus’s contested 2020 presidential election when the authoritarian Lukashenko clung to power amid allegations of vote rigging, triggering mass anti-government protests. Kureichik was forced to flee the country for belonging to a group that was working with perceived winner Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya’s transition team.
During his World Fellowship, he received official notification that he had been charged with crimes against the state. Kureichik’s Belorussian passport was revoked, and he has remained in New Haven with his teenage son while his wife and three other children remain in Minsk. Over the past two years, he has served as an associate research scholar for the European Studies Council at the MacMillan Center for International and Area Studies at Yale and has taught courses at Yale about post-Soviet politics and culture, including a seminar titled “Art and Resistance in Belarus, Russia, and Ukraine.” At the same time, he has pursued research and creative work through his fellowship with the Fortunoff Archive.
“The Empty Shell of War” draws on testimonies of women survivors from Belarus, which Nazi Germany occupied from June 1941 through August 1944.
Kureichik weaved stories of survival and resistance from the accounts of three women — along with details from the testimonies of dozens of others — into a single character, who describes the trauma of war and persecution as well as the lingering suffering that accompanied liberation and immigration to the United States. (One of the three women upon whom the character is based was the partisan fighter whose younger sister dove under the ice to safety.)
For the project, Kureichik combed through testimonies in the Fortunoff Archive for gripping stories to shape into a compelling dramatic arc.
“The whole idea of playwriting and dramaturgy is to capture the essence of the testimonies — the essential thoughts, emotions, and stories expressed within them — and put them in the right order,” said Kureichik, whose two-year fellowship with the archive concludes in the spring.
The play also adds a sense of immediacy to events that happened generations ago, he said.
“Part of the magic of theater and the magic of art is that they can function as a time machine,” he said. “The audience can see the story unfold in real time, not in retrospect.”
The Fortunoff Archive also supported Kureichik on “New Voices of Belarus,” an art-documentary film he made that presents monologues of Belarusian or political prisoners persecuted by the Lukashenko regime as recited by Yale faculty members.
His status as a dissident in exile made listening to the testimonies especially poignant, said Kureichik, who is working to get approvals for his family to come to the United States.
“Perhaps the terrible experiences recounted in the testimonies were more understandable to me as I’ve had my house taken by the Lukashenko regime, my family has been interrogated, and my friends imprisoned,” he said.
Reckoning with history — and ‘unimaginable’ realities
Krug, the author and illustrator who is also an associate professor of illustration at Parsons School of Design in New York, approaches the material in the testimonies as a native of Germany, a country that has wrestled collectively with its responsibility for the Holocaust.
“I am from the country of the perpetrators,” she said. “My grandparents were not in the resistance or victims of the Nazi regime, nor were they major perpetrators. How do I, as somebody with this ‘heritage,’ deal with the subject matter in a way that is respectful and is true to the narrative of the survivors?”
Krug, whose graphic memoir, “Belonging: A German Reckons with History and Home”— winner of the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award — examines her family’s history during the World War II era, said she aims to be sincere in her approach to the Holocaust testimonies and will focus on representing the narratives accurately and empathetically in a way that is accessible to readers.
“I think in traditional history writing, the personal narrative is sometimes overlooked,” she said. “Or maybe it’s used to draw conclusions or establish facts rather than to create empathy. The goal of the artist in the widest sense is to give you a sense of the experience, to draw you in emotionally, and not reach a conclusion but raise a set of questions about humanity and, in this case, about why it is that we wage war and how we can avoid it happening ever again.”
Since the fall, she has been researching testimonies for her project, which will focus on the notion of revenge as applied to survivors of the Holocaust and other atrocities and conflicts.
“By focusing on revenge, I find it easier to listen to the testimonies because it’s about a moment of perceived strength,” said Krug, who illustrated the graphic version of Yale historian Timothy Snyder’s book, “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century.” “Not everybody chose to take revenge, obviously, but some people did. And whether they regretted it later or not is another question, but those testimonies speak to a moment of power.”
I try to bring readers as close as I can to this unimaginable reality by capturing the genuine voices of those involved in it.
Kwiatkowski, who is from Gdansk in northern Poland, has used his poetry, music, and activism to preserve and amplify the memory of the Holocaust in his native country.
His grandfather, a survivor, had been imprisoned in the Stutthof concentration camp east of Gdansk. When Kwiatkowski was nine years old, his grandfather took him to the museum at the site of camp’s remnants — it was the first time the elder man had been to Stutthof since the war — and was overcome with emotion.
“He started to cry, to shout, to scream, and I didn’t know what was going on,” said Kwiatkowski, whose fellowship began this semester. “I didn’t know what to do. It was one of the most important events in my life because it led me to ask questions about why people kill each other; why people build concentration camps; why people build gas chambers.”
In his work as a memory activist, Kwiatkowski has advocated for the preservation of about a half-million pairs of shoes that were discarded in the forest near Stutthof, which was a leather reclamation center in the Nazi’s network of concentration camps. His literary works tackle themes of violence, genocide, and human rights. His acclaimed poetry collection, “Crops,” based on Holocaust testimonies, gives voice to victims, witnesses, collaborators, and perpetrators of Nazi terror.
“The horror of the Holocaust is unimaginable,” he said. “I try to bring readers as close as I can to this unimaginable reality by capturing the genuine voices of those involved in it. When the reader engages with my work, he has entered a moral trap because he must imagine what he would do in these circumstances. And of course, he doesn’t know. None of us knows what we would do.”
Kwiatkowski, who is also the front man for the post-punk band Trupa Trupa, says he believes in the power of art to improve the world. He is hopeful that amplifying the voices he discovers in the Fortunoff Archive will prompt people to appreciate the humanity of the survivors and consider the evil they faced.
“I think that by facing the horrors from the past, we can be better people,” he said.
