Director's Note

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 A death camp is the crucible in which Arthur Miller seeks human definition from the literal and spiritual meltdown.   Fania, a musician with a thrilling voice, still young and still with radiance, is led in with other women to this death camp where their degradation accelerates.  What Fania finds so hopeless is that those who run this horror are of the same species: "Human, Like you! Like me."  The immediate necessity is survival and Fania meets Alma, who has been reprieved from the gas chamber because she's the niece of the great composer Gustav Mahler and because she has formed a small orchestra among the women to play music for their jailers.  "There is life or death in this place," Alma tells Fania, "There is no room for anything else whatever.  We must play to please them."  Fania, who has joined the orchestra, replies, "I prefer to think I am saving my life rather than trying to please the S.S."  Then Alma expresses their dilemma with, "You think you can do one without the other?" Another young woman tries to justify her utter capitulation for trifles says, "I'm not going to live to get out of here anyway." "But if you do?" Fania asks, "What if you live?" With allied forces approaching, the killing is increased and the physical and emotional pressure on the few left is shattering. "We know a little something about the human race we didn't know before," Fania says, "and it is not good news."  Looking out at the yellow smoke rising from the oven smokestacks.  Fania is approached by a perhaps deranged, perhaps very wise prisoner who whispers a one-word message... "Live." And the meltdown is not total-From the Dramatic Publishing Company Website.

        The Holocaust was a result of blindness and hatred, of fever-pitched fervor that destroyed reason.  Single-minded zealots found themselves with the power of life and death.   They then exerted that power over the innocent.  It is our hope that we can examine our own lives and the troubled world around us through the filter that Miller has provided.  "Those who do not learn from the past are condemned to repeat it." George Santayana.