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Diane Samuels |
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Plays Kindertransport Authors notes
Plays Kindertransport Authors notes
| Kindertransport Authors Notes |
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In 1989, when I was a young mother with a one year old son and pregnant with my second child. I saw a TV documentary commemorating the fiftieth anniversary of the Kindertransport, showing how 10,000 children, mostly Jewish, had come over to seek refuge in England from Nazi occupied Europe. I was struck at once by the ways in which parents and children struggled to deal with this desperate parting. I never intended to write Kindertransport as a modern history play. I wanted to explore the universal human experience of separation of child from parent, of refugee from the source of their culture or “motherland”. I let this theme mull, up to my ears in nappies and baby milk, for a while longer. In 1991, I wrote a scene between two German Jews. A mother hovers over her nine year old daughter and hands a new coat to the child. It is too big because it must last for ‘next winter too’. She gives the girl a button and some thread and then coolly instructs her how to sew the one onto the other. By this time, my young sons were not yet one and not quite three. Artists are often drawn to the extremes of human experience in order to reflect also upon what is ordinary. “Kinder”, now in their seventies and eighties, have, on seeing the play, asked me, “How can you possibly understand my experience so deeply?” I reply that as a young mother myself I couldn’t help but be touched by what had happened to them. I was compelled to get to the heart of the unresolvable dilemma. Ask a child if they would prefer to be sent away to safety if their family is in mortal danger, and he or she will, in most cases, say that they’d rather stay and die with their parents. Ask a parent what they would do in the same situation and most would say that they’d send away their child to be safe. To be a parent is to live with this hidden contradiction. I wanted to try to face it. When my eldest son left home in autumn 2006 I discovered just how Life reflects Art. I found myself watching actresses in auditions for Shared Experience Theatre company’s revival of Kindertransport read the scene in which English Evelyn loads her daughter Faith with crockery and pans for her student flat. Then I went home and hours later loaded my boy with mugs and glasses for his student flat. I wonder at how acutely I could evoke Evelyn’s suppressed heartache at Faith’s departure when my children were still so young and at home with me. But many parents, from the second their child is born, know too well that here begins the road to seeing their offspring on their way. The bitter-sweet task is to prepare their child to manage entirely without them. I used to dedicate the play to the 10,000 “Kinder” who left Europe over seventy years ago. Now I see that, by entering the exceptional experience of those children who caught the trains to safety when many of them, like Eva, were too young to bear it, a crucial connection can be made with the clinging child inside us all that never wants to let go, no matter what. So, now I dedicate the play also to those fortunate children who have the opportunity to leave their parents when they are ready. And to the parents who raise their children to take that leave. No child, as Evelyn must struggle so painfully to accept, can be “my little girl”, or boy, forever, if they are to thrive. |