School play tells grandfather’s Holocaust story

“Behind the mask of every soldier – German, South African, Jewish – lies a human being. We can never forget what real people went through fighting for the world we live in today.”

These are the words of King David Victory Park (KDVP) alumnus Keren Katzew, who wrote one of the two Holocaust plays performed at the Johannesburg Holocaust & Genocide Centre last weekend. The script was based on her late grandfather, Joe Katzew’s, memoirs.

Performing the double-feature Holocaust performance at the centre became an annual event for KDVP High School’s drama department in 2017. The COVID-19 pandemic halted it, and it was resumed on 10 May with the Katzew play titled Under The Fence and a dramatised adaptation of The Diary of Anne Frank by Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett.

The moving performance of Under The Fence tells the story of six soldiers brought together by their shared identities as South African, Jewish men during their military service in World War II. When one of the men, Katzew, is ordered to be the first to go under the fence into German territory, it appears to be a death sentence.

The plot follows Joe (played by Ben Lustig) as he experiences once-in-a-lifetime friendships with his fellow soldiers, confronts devastating grief as he watches lives being taken by the war, and learns invaluable lessons about acceptance and humility.

Katzew began writing around 2019 after reading her grandfather’s memoir. “His stories about war, bravery, love, and friendship inspired me,” she said. “I felt that his story and my family’s story had to be told.”

In addition to the memoir, Katzew spoke to her father, discovering aspects of her grandfather’s personality, such as his positive outlook on life.

“The main character’s lines were actually exactly taken from the memoir; they are my grandfather’s words to a tee. We took creative liberty with the other characters’ lines,” she says.

In her Grade 9 year, she began to edit the script with the help of Renos Spanoudes in the hope of taking it to the Festival of Excellence in Dramatic Arts. Unfortunately, that festival was cancelled due to the pandemic. Katzew continued to work on the play over the next couple of years, and this year, after matriculating from KDVP in 2022, she decided to work with Grade 11 student Sam Bonner (who also played Otto Frank in The Diary of Anne Frank) to finally bring the play to life.

This is Bonner’s directing debut, an experience he said was very different from acting. Nonetheless, it was an amazing opportunity, especially because of the wonderful team he worked with.

Bonner said that when he and Katzew began reworking the script, “the themes of love and death came through”. They found that “Each character has someone he loves and is willing to die for – very much like real life.”

“Originally the story was solely my grandfather’s, and I never knew much about the other characters,” Katzew said. “Sam and I took a bit of creative licence to give the other characters their own stories, [and] although those stories may not have been exactly true, they mimic the truths of many soldiers during that time. We wanted it to be a tribute to all the soldiers of World War II, not just one.”

The five other soldiers, Norman Riskowitz (played by Daniel Kantor); Les Pincus (Daniel Segal); Rodney Murray (Ricky Kotton); Louis Schneider (Josh Woolf); and Issy Edgal (Giorgio Klein) are each given unique personality quirks and backgrounds that make them that much more relatable to the audience. Their found family is completed by their commanding officer, Major Julia Klenhans (Gabrielle Shapiro), who acts as a sort of maternal figure to the young soldiers.

Katzew, with the help of her grandfather’s memoir, was able to capture not only her grandfather’s story, but the story of so many who might otherwise have been overlooked. There are also moments of the story that are quite unique, such as when Joe crosses paths with a German soldier (played by Max Radford), who shares a South African background. The two strike up a conversation, and Joe realises that they aren’t so different from each other.

The Anne Frank piece contains a combination of moments inspired by Anne’s actual descriptions in her diary which reveal the lives of the Franks and the Van Daans during their time in hiding. Although the undertones of the play are devastating, it’s also full of hopeful and even humorous moments in Anne’s life. The audience gets to witness Anne’s (Gabrielle Shapiro) free-spirited nature and the heart-warming bond between her and her father, or playful fights with Peter or Margot. The familiarity created between the audience and these characters makes the ending of the play that much more gut-wrenching as Otto Frank describes each character’s horrific fate.