“My nana was an iridescent entertainer. And I remember her as a bitch… She was a very savvy businesswoman and she played hardball… she was totally erratic, so you never knew if she was going to be kind or enraged. When I was growing up, I didn’t get the vivacious [version]. I got the bitter and cruel and angry one.”
It’s a startlingly frank and vivid opening by Beth Paterson, whose multi-layered one-woman play, written in collaboration with Kat Yates, the director, melds together memories, storytelling and verbatim accounts of Niusia Rubinlicht, who was deported from the Warsaw ghetto during the Second World War to Auschwitz. At the concentration camp in Nazi-occupied Poland she was a forced assistant to Josef Mengele.
Niusia, who came from a well-educated, wealthy Jewish family, was a nurse and had been studying to be a doctor via a correspondence course in Italy, being unable to do so as a woman and a Jew in Poland. At Auschwitz, she was an obvious forced candidate to help the Nazi doctor, known as “the angel of death”, conduct inhumane medical experiments on prisoners, mainly twin children, in pseudo-scientific racial studies.
Paterson, 30, from Melbourne, gives a powerful performance, gyrating between her “loud and prickly” nana – played with a somewhat hammy Polish-Jewish accent – various iterations of herself, and her mum, Susie, a psychologist and author, who features via a voiceover recalling as a six-year-old her “very tender” mother: “Give her an audience and she was absolutely, coruscatingly brilliant.”
In an intense hour, there are graphic descriptions of Niusia smuggling out medication “in her cavities” for fellow inmates and of the forced humiliation in which prisoners soiled themselves; then of her returning after the war to Poland where an antisemitic neighbour came at her with a knife. Equally, there’s gallows humour, with Paterson slapping her bum at one point and noting how “arse-shvitz” (yiddish for “sweating arse”) sounds like “Auschwitz” and jazz music to accompany a party thrown by her grandmother during the 1956 Melbourne Olympics, with Paterson picturing people queueing for the doughnuts she was making in the kitchen of her family home in the suburb of Elwood.
The set flits between one of her grandmother’s handful of Melbourne dress shops in the 1960s, her living room, a boarding house she ran and the nursing home where Paterson sings “My Funny Valentine” and “Blue Moon”, addressing her as “Moja kochana babcia [My darling grandmother]”. There’s also what Paterson calls “a liminal memory space” and as the action darts around it examines the effect on her of “an awful lot of secrets and no-go zones” in her mother’s childhood. “Openness is our ethic,” she says. Probably the only Jew at an Anglican school, she didn’t have a batmitzvah and calls herself “Jew…ish”.
During the heated action, books, including one on psychology, are angrily thrown out of cardboard boxes and gently put back in, while an empty armchair with a shawl draped over the back eloquently conjures up its multilingual missing occupant, who died, aged 86, in 2008. Niusia and her husband, Leon, we were told earlier, had met at a postwar displaced persons’ camp and she gave birth, while still suffering from malnutrition two years after the war ended, to identical twin girls. “Isn’t that the best ‘f*ck-you’,” says Paterson.
Summerhall, former women’s locker room (Until Aug 25)
