War and the Holocaust: A reflection of experiences from 1939-1945 in the productions and writings of Erwin Axer

Rafał Węgrzyniak

Abstract

The essay is an attempt to recreate the experiences of the director Erwin Axer (1917-2012), who staged productions not only on Polish- but also German-language stages during the war of 1939-1945. From September 1939 to June 1941 he was employed, also as an actor, in the Polish theatre in Lvov, incorporated into the Soviet Union. In July 1941, considered a Jew by the Germans, he was locked up in the Lvov ghetto, where he worked as a labourer. After escaping from the ghetto in December 1942, he was hiding in private apartments in Warsaw. From August to October 1944 he took part in the Warsaw Uprising. After the insurgents’ defeat, together with the soldiers of the Home Army, he was taken to a prisoner-of-war camp in Germany, liberated by the US Army in May 1945. Axer frequently returned to these experiences in his memoirs and indirectly in some of his productions, such as Niemcy (Germans) and Pierwszy dzień wolności (The First Day of Freedom) by Leon Kruczkowski, Bertolt Brecht’s Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui and Peter Weiss’s Investigation. Although he showed restraint in invoking his experiences as a would-be victim of the Holocaust, having a complicated Polish-Jewish-German identity, he did not deprive the executioners of their humanity in his productions, including Adolf Hitler. He made a settlement with the crimes committed during the reign of the ideology of national socialism practically from the inner perspective of German culture.