The high school’s fall play this year is A Star On My Heart. It’s based on the true story of Inge Auerbacher, a Holocaust survivor who is still living today. She spent 3 years as a child in Terezin, a concentration camp in Czechoslovakia. She was one of the few children who survived. After the Holocaust, she and her parents moved to New York. Auerbacher eventually became a chemist and later an author, writing books about her experience.
The play deals with the complicated nature of discrimination and the horror of the Holocaust. In the end, Auerbacher and her parents do survive and are reunited (which was rare) and left to live in America. However, though it brings a message of hope, the trauma and difficult truths that the play brings cannot be glossed over.
A Star On My Heart will have a small cast of about 15 people, and a crew of 8-10.
It may feel as if Bethany has put on a lot of plays centering around the Holocaust- The Sound Of Music in 2010 and I Never Saw Another Butterfly in 2011- but these stories still need to be heard. The same kind of racism, anti-Semitism, and hatred that caused the Holocaust still exists today. The protests in Charlottesville and the continuing presence of Neonazi and white supremacist groups in America and Europe point to a world that can still stand to learn from what hatred (and casual allowance of hatred by others) can lead to in the Holocaust.
Inge Auerbacher is still living, and she is planning to come and visit the cast during the rehearsal process. Angela Miloro Hansen, the woman who wrote the play, is going to be present at the performances of the play. And local Jewish people from South Bend are going to come and speak with the cast about their experience of being Jewish in today’s world.
The Star On My Heart is sure to be an exciting play and a lot of fun for its cast and crew.