Performer's Note
The following is S. Bear Bergman’s Performer’s Note
for “Monday Night in Westerbork,” as performed at
UMass Amherst on October 11, 2006...
"In Westerbork, Holland, there was a small concentration camp. It was a small and not especially well known camp, it had no gas chambers—it simply collected and shipped people to Auschwitz. For a period of about twenty months, it also had a theater company—Camp Westerbork Theater Group, as it was known, founded by performer Max Ehrlich. It included as many as 51 members at the height of its membership and performed six different fully realized shows over the course of its existence, with a performance every Monday night.
"As the Nazi regime had closed even the last few opportunities for Jewish performers in Germany and Austria, many fled. As they were arrested and sent to Westerbork for transport, the camp accumulated some of the most famous performers of the time. These included Max Ehrlich, an actor, comedian, cabaret emcee, and bon vivant who is thought to have proposed the idea for the theater company, there being not a whole lot else to do at Westerbork except wait around to be murdered. This was permitted because the camp’s Commandant, Albert Gemmeker, recognized that he suddenly owned the best cabaret in Europe, of which he was quite proud. The shows were even performed on a proper stage, built of salvaged boards from a burned synagogue in a nearby community.
"Max Ehrlich was murdered at Auschwitz on October 1, 1944. Monday Night in Westerbork is, in many ways, two shows—the show Max might have done, had he lived, and the show I made in the space created because he did not."
—S. Bear Bergman
