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February 11, 2000/5 Adar 1 5760, Vol. 52, No.23
Letters to death-camp escapee form core of 'Dear Esther'
SALVATORE CAPUTO
Special for Jewish News
If you read the book "Escape From Sobibor" or saw the movie based on it, then you already know the title character of "Dear Esther," the latest production of the Arizona Jewish Theatre Company.
Esther Raab was one of 300 Jews who, in 1943, rebelled and escaped from the death camp in Sobibor, Poland. Only 50 of the escapees survived World War II.
The mass escape was proof of the human spirit's indomitable yearning for freedom, but the story didn't truly end with the escape or even with surviving the war. "Dear Esther" deals with the emotional chains the survivors carried, despite having won their physical freedom.
Richard Rashke, the Washington, D.C.-based writer who wrote the play, says, "It's about a person who was terribly scarred because of (internment at Sobibor) and whose life has never been 'normal' ever since, the pain and the tragedy is so deep."
Rashke, who is not Jewish, and Raab became "telephone pals" when he was doing research for "Escape From Sobibor," which he also wrote. She was one of 19 survivors of the escape that the writer interviewed.
"Esther was by far the most balanced survivor I spoke to," he says. "I trusted her so much that she is the only survivor that I showed a copy of my manuscript to. She reviewed the manuscript for me and with me" in the effort to catch any important errors or omissions.
The trust between the two grew during the book project to the point that when the idea for a film version of "Escape From Sobibor" came up, Rashke told the producers that Raab should be a technical consultant, and the producers listened. "She took the job, but refused to accept any money for it," Rashke says. "She called it 'blood money.' ... She flew to Yugoslavia (where the movie was filmed), and paid her own airfare and hotel bill."
The first time they met, Rashke observed the emotional chains weighing her down. Raab was speaking at a conference of soldiers and medics who liberated concentration camps in World War II.
"She was so scared her hands were shaking," Rashke recalls. "I thought it was stage fright but it had nothing to do with being afraid of speaking before an audience. It had everything to do with her fears of becoming too emotional and of reliving the escape, the tragedy and the pain at Sobibor."
Raab, who had dared the escape from Sobibor armed only with a pocketful of sand to throw in the eyes of her captors, found it frightening to face those brutal memories. However, today she is able to speak freely and openly about her experiences before thousands of youngsters because "Escape From Sobibor" began a new process of healing in her.
When the CBS-TV network showed the movie, it made "Escape From Sobibor" part of its Read More About It program.
"The network ... made scripts with discussion questions available for hundreds of thousands of schoolchildren across the country," Rashke says. One of them was a Holocaust-education program in a New Jersey public school. At the end of the movie, the movie's main characters are freeze-framed as they escape. Their fates are revealed in legends on the screen, and one explains that Esther Raab lives in New Jersey with her husband.
"You can imagine what happened when they showed the movie ... and the kids found out she lives in New Jersey," Rashke says. "They went crazy looking for her." They found her and invited her to speak. It was an emotionally risky proposition. "These are public schools, right, so you don't know what you're going to get," he says. "She wasn't sure what was going to happen, but she took the risk."
At first, she went to classrooms to speak. She worked her way up to going on stage in school auditoriums, where she'd stand and field questions, sometimes for hours. Since this was in public schools, "99.999 percent of the kids were not Jewish," but Raab started receiving letters by the hundreds.
The letters revealed the children's ignorance of what went on in the camps, they asked all sorts of questions (i.e., "Did you have a boyfriend in the camp?" "How can you still believe in God after what you went through?"), and they expressed their admiration, many of them calling her a hero. "They're love letters," Rashke says. "Many of these kids didn't know a Jew from an Eskimo. They responded to the tragedy with a completely open mind."
Because of their friendship, Raab would read the letters to him on the phone. After this had gone on for a while, he suggested that they work together to write an article about them, but she said, "No."
Then, he suggested, they write a play and she agreed. However, she made one stipulation: He must make the play understandable to children.
" 'You don't have to write it for children, but make it so that families can come to see it,' she told me." This was her gift back to the children for the letters of admiration and love they had sent her. Rashke stresses that he hasn't write a kids' play, but rather one that won't fly over children's heads as they watch it with their classmates or their parents. "Parents and children are talking about Holocaust-related things all the way home in the car, into the evening and the next morning at breakfast," he says.
Healing is the point of the play, Rashke says. "The kids' letters form a core to this play. As she gets these letters, you see Esther on stage growing and healing.
"My ideal, what I really wanted, was a mixed audience of gentiles and Jews, a mixed cast of Jews and gentiles all working together on the same play and all crying the same tears. ... People are crying not because it's painful, but because it's moving and touching. At that moment, we're all united. That's healing."
"Dear Esther," an Arizona Jewish Theatre Company production, will be presented from Feb. 19 through March 5 at Stage West of the Herberger Theater Center, 222 E. Monroe St., Phoenix. Show times are Thursdays through Saturdays at 8 p.m., Sundays at 2 p.m., with a 7 p.m. show on Sunday, Feb. 20, in addition to special student performances. Tickets are $24.50 and $26.50 and are available from the AJTC, 602-264-0402; the Herberger box office, 602-252-8497; and Dillard's, 480-503-5555.
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