Coming of Age as a Queer Teenager in the Holocaust: Bringing Margot to the Stage
Mon, October 28, 2024 7:00 PM - Mon, October 28, 2024 8:30 PM at RCAH Theater - C20 Snyder-Phillips Hall (downstairs), 362 Bogue St.
The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman is a play about the first lesbian Holocaust survivor to bear testimony. Margot Heuman (1928-2022) was a survivor of Theresienstadt ghetto, Auschwitz, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen. After the war, Heuman emigrated to the US, and spent the last years of her life in Green Valley, AZ. The play, which takes its text from interviews conducted by Warwick University historian Anna Hájková, offers a poignant look at coming of age as a Jewish queer woman in the concentration camps. In the play, Margot Heuman reflects on love, choices, sexual violence and sexual barter, homophobia, and survival. Moving, funny, pragmatic, and original, she reminds us of humanity within the society of Holocaust victims, but also of the stories that have been erased by homophobia. Heuman will probably remain the only lesbian voice to speak about her experience in the Holocaust. “I am amazing,” she tells her interviewer, and the audience.
Directed by Erika Hughes (Portsmouth University), this work of documentary theatre layers Heuman’s testimony with archival imagery and projection. Actor Ayse Evans, who reads the testimony of Margot, notes that “this is the queer story I never had growing up, but that I am so glad my daughter will have.” This play offers a rare and important glimpse into queer life during the Holocaust, one of the most silenced and marginalized topics of this genocide.
Dr. Anna Hájková is Reader for Modern European Continental History at the University of Warwick. Her book, The Last Ghetto: An Everyday History of Theresienstadt, came out in 2020 with Oxford University Press. She has also published three short books: in addition to a coauthored book on the Veit Simon family, she edited family wartime diaries from the Communist resistance in the Holocaust. In 2021, she published Menschen ohne Geschichte sind Staub with Wallstein, on queer teenagers in the Holocaust. The book is coming out as People Without History are Dust in an expanded English translation with the University of Toronto Press. She is currently a fellow at the Frankel Center for Judaic Studies where she is working on a book on the Neuengamme guard Anneliese Kohlmann and queer Holocaust history.
Co-Sponsors: College of Arts and Letters, College of Social Science, James Madison College, Residential College of Arts and Humanities, International Studies and Programs, Department of Linguistics, Languages, and Cultures, and Asian Studies.