Théâtre en Foire – What is a theatre? (extracts)
December 1, 1990
Yesterday, at the Théâtre de la Colline, for the dress rehearsal of “Zone Libre” by Jean-Claude Grumberg. We came out amazed, moved, shaken, overwhelmed.
What talent! As a writer and as an actor. And what mastery! Together with “L’Atelier” and “Rixe”, it is one of the finest achievements of this playwright, who is undoubtedly the very first of his generation. A leap half a century into the past. Into our past. For it is also about us – about Odette and me. Every scene, every line, every word of this work took us back to our clandestine life, to our “network”, to our hundreds of children whom we first had to “depersonalise” before entrusting them to religious institutions and foster families – hiding places – with their false papers, their false baptism certificates and their false identities.
– Repeat after me: My name is Henri Rocher, I am six years old…
– My name is Henri… Rocher. I am… six years old…
– My parents were killed in a bombing raid in Dieppe.
– My parents were killed in a bombing raid… No, no… I can’t…
– Let’s start again. Repeat after me: My name is…
After the show, while waiting for the taxi, we felt as if we were surrounded, encircled by those children whom we had kept out of the Gestapo’s clutches and saved from certain death. They were all there, our Blumenfelds, our Birenbaums, our Switas, our Rozenbaums, our Cohens… And little Schneerson (five years old), who stubbornly refused to be separated from his sister, because he had promised his parents, before they were arrested, to protect her…
After all, nothing prevents us from believing that these children, now in their sixties, were there with us at the performance of “Zone Libre”. Nor does anything prevent us from hoping that during the show, thanks to Jean-Claude Grumberg, they gave a thought to Sylvie and to “Monsieur Marcel”. [Sylvie, Monsieur Marcel: the pseudonyms we used in our clandestine life. Odette was called Sylvie Delattre, and I was addressed as “Monsieur Marcel”.]