TEMPLE – While rehearsing the play “I Will Bear Witness,” based on the diaries of Holocaust survivor Viktor Klemperer, actor George Bartenieff became ill several times and almost decided not to perform the piece.
“I almost didn’t know if I could do it,” he said. When he did, finally, finish rehearsing and performing for an audience for the first time, Bartenieff said it was like “being liberated.”
And he knows what he is talking about.
Bartenieff himself fled Germany for New York in 1939 with his parents. His personal history is one of the reasons he decided to act the part of Klemperer in “I Will Bear Witness,” which will be performed at 7:30 p.m. Saturday, Nov. 19, at the Temple Stream Theater in Temple.
“It turned out there were many similarities. He was in a mixed marriage, and I’m the result of a mixed marriage. So much of what he went through I shared with him. As a character and as a person, I’m able to be very sympathetic to what he feels and thinks, and expresses in his diaries,” Bartenieff explained.
Born in Germany in 1881 to a Reform rabbi, Klemperer converted to Protestantism at a young age, married an “Aryan” musician, earned a doctorate and became a professor of Romance literature in Dresden before Hitler came to power. As a member of a “mixed marriage,” Klemperer was one of the last Jews to be slated for deportation, and was one of only 300 Jews remaining in Dresden when the Allies firebombed the city in 1945.
Relatively safe from deportation, Klemperer still suffered countless losses during the Holocaust, among them his job, cats, house, car, the ability to buy coffee or clothing and the use of his typewriter.
According to a Bartenieff news release, Klemperer resolved that his contribution to the fight against Nazism was to keep his diary. Bartenieff said Klemperer wrote, “I will bear witness. I will bear precise witness.”
It is the record of both the small and large indignities that Klemperer and his wife faced, and their German neighbors’ responses to them, that the play explores, Bartenieff said Monday.
The diaries from 1933 to 1939 describe “an erosion that takes place under your nose, and you’re not aware of it – you don’t know what to do,” Bartenieff said. “One thing here is, nobody thought that this would last. Nobody, not for a long time. They said, This has to collapse, because it’s so extreme.’ And you know, guess what? You no longer protest, no longer do this, no longer do that.”
In addition to Saturday’s performance at the Temple Stream Theater, the one-man show will be presented at 7:30 p.m. today at the Brackett Memorial Church on Peak’s Island, and at 2 p.m. Sunday, Nov. 20, at Jewett Hall at the University of Maine at Augusta. Tickets cost $8 for adults and $4 for students.
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