Even after working on Light / The Holocaust & Humanity Project for more than a year, pulling together the funding, the partners and the programming, I don’t think that we, as an organization, were prepared for the emotional impact that this project and the ballet performances would have on us. We began to feel it in August, when Dr. Edie Naveh came to PBT with her friend Samuel Weinreb, a survivor of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Dr. Naveh set the stage for us to watch Genocide, the 1982 award-winning documentary about the Holocaust. After the film, Sam recounted his experience from the day, at age thirteen, that he came home to find his family had been taken, to his arrival in McKeesport several years later where his relatives welcomed him into their home.
The next day Pittsburgh Ballet Theatre traveled to Washington, D.C. to experience the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum and hear another survivor, Louisa Lawrence-Israels, tell her story. The amount of information and emotions to process was overwhelming.
When the production opened at the Byham Theater in November, the preparations were over, and friendships had been forged; but the full impact of what we had experienced became abundantly clear when the dancers took the stage.
How could any human being survive the trauma of that ordeal? What pain and devastation they must have felt. The survivors we met possess an inherent appreciation of life that most of us take for granted. Hopefully, each of us will go forward, mindful and with a watchful eye, doing our small part to discourage intolerance. A work of art has done its job well when it awakens and inspires its viewers toward a conscious effort to make the world a better place.
