LEWISTON – When Martin Andrucki sees his play “Manny’s War” on stage again, he’ll be thinking of the sweet, scarred man he once knew.

And of the shame sheep farmer Murray Schwartz of Mechanic Falls, Maine, carried.

“It’s a little bittersweet in the fact that Murray is not around to experience a second production of the play,” Andrucki said.

He’d have liked it.

“Manny’s War” was Schwartz’s story. Andrucki, a theater professor at Bates College, wrote the play.

The story follows Schwartz’s character, renamed “Manny,” from his days as a Jewish teenager looking to kill Nazis to his capture and torture at the hands of his would-be victims.

Weaving through memories of war is a contemporary story of the search for healing.

A collaboration between Bates College and The Public Theatre led to a 2000 production. Schwartz attended every performance, sitting in the third or fourth row.

“It’s true. All of it,” Schwartz said in a 2000 interview with the Sun Journal. He died in 2005, having found a measure of healing from his worst war wounds.

Among his scars was a single act of survival. Andrucki built the drama around it, creating a kind of detective story. Only at the end does the audience learn what Murray did.

“It was the measure of how far down you could go,” Schwartz said in 2000. “It stayed with me to make me a better person.”

As source material for the play, Andrucki used recordings between Schwartz and a social worker. He later spent a lot of time with Schwartz, even traveling with him to Germany, where many of the events took place.

Schwartz fought in World War II’s Battle of the Bulge. German soldiers captured and tortured him.

“A lot of his life was about compensating for what he thought were his failures as a prisoner of war,” Andrucki said. “He spent a lot of energy, a lot of spiritual energy and a lot of physical energy, trying to come to terms with what happened.”

The play is being revived by Damariscotta’s Lincoln Theater. It premiered Jan. 16 and is scheduled to run until Jan. 25.

Andrucki has not had a role in the new production – “I haven’t even attended a rehearsal,” he said – but he expects there may be references to Vietnam and Iraq.

Schwartz suffered like so many men who have returned from every war, Andrucki said.

So many survivors have guilt. Schwartz sought forgiveness and absolution for things most of us would dismiss as a small casualty of war.

“That haunted him and haunted him and haunted him,” Andrucki said.

With each telling, Schwartz healed a little, he told the Sun Journal in 2000.

“The shame eases a bit,” he said.