20.01.2009
An award-winning play about survivors of the Holocaust by American playwright James Still comes to the Scottish Parliament on Tuesday 27 January, which is Holocaust Memorial Day.
At the invitation of the Equal Opportunities Committee, the Blue Sky Network will perform ‘And Then They Came For Me – Remembering The World of Anne Frank’. The play is a multi-media production that uses actors and video footage to tell the story of Auschwitz survivor Eva Schloss and her step-sister Anne Frank. Following the play, Eva Schloss will take part in a question-and-answer session with the audience, hosted by the play’s director and producer Nic Careem.
Equal Opportunities Committee Convener Margaret Mitchell MSP said: “This is an internationally renowned play. Its impact and positive message of promoting community cohesion resonates particularly strongly on Holocaust Memorial Day. As such, the Equal Opportunities Committee is delighted to host the performance of the play on this significant day.”
Seventy-nine-year-old Eva Schloss, a writer and grandmother who now lives in London, said: “I am pleased that the play is being performed at the Scottish Parliament, thanks to Iain McGill [a mutual friend of Eva and Nic], Margaret Mitchell and the Equal Opportunities Committee, and I hope this will lead to it being performed in other institutions across Scotland.
"Unfortunately, many young people do not know very much about what happened in the last century, how hatred and prejudice prevailed and prevented people from resisting evil. Through knowledge of what happened then, we are trying to prevent a repetition of such horrors.”
Background
The play is based on Eva Schloss’s autobiography ‘Eva’s Story’, published in 1988. In 1995 the American playwright James Still wrote ‘And Then They Came For Me – Remembering The World of Anne Frank’, an educational multi-media play that weaves video interviews of Holocaust survivors – including Eva Schloss – with live actors recreating scenes from World War II. The play lasts for 70 minutes and will be followed by a 30-minute question and answer session.
The play’s producers, the Blue Sky Network, in association with Second Generation (an organisation of Holocaust survivors and their children), Holocaust-related organisation Yad Vashem UK and The Big Issue, have staged the play in more than 150 UK schools, prisons and colleges in the past two years. The Blue Sky Network plans to tour the play to more than 500 schools and prisons as part of its 2009 Hatebuster programme. Nic Careem, a British Muslim, and Eva Schloss have ambitions to show the play in Israel and Palestine with a cast of Muslims and Jews, as well as in parliaments across the world.
While the company are in Edinburgh they will also perform the play at Saughton Prison and in a number of schools.