World Premiere Of ‘The Girl From Treblinka’ Will Be Performed In Edmonton On May 23

The inception of his latest play, The Girl from Treblinka, can be traced back to 1984, Berlin, in what was then West Germany. “While I was in Berlin, I went to a place that I was told was, in a sense, a Jewish museum – for Jewish artifacts and history – a preservation of Jews of Berlin. It wasn’t an exclusive museum,” explained Stone, remembering the meager offerings on display. “It was a few rooms attached to an existing municipal museum.”

“In one of the displays there were a series of diaries that had been rescued from the rubble of bombed Berlin. And since I couldn’t read German, I didn’t have any idea what the diaries were about” he said, chuckling.  “So, I called one of the security people over and asked him if he was aware of their contents.  In his broken English and my Yiddish, we were somehow able to communicate.  I pointed to one diary, and I have no idea why I pointed to that specific one, but he said he was familiar with it and its contents and that it had been written by a young Jewish woman in Berlin.”

“The diary ended after Kristallnacht,” said Stone pausing for a moment of reflection and recollection. “And every now and then, going through the years, I would ask myself, why did it specifically end after Kristallnacht?  Like almost all the other Jews in Berlin, she would have eventually been sent on to the camps – this is just supposition on my part.”

Decades later, Stone, a self-described “nighthawk,” was watching television at 2 am. “CSPAN was televising, live, the Polish government’s, commemoration of the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz. It was done with grace, sincerity, and with dignity. And at that point I said to myself, ‘self, you are now a writer, you have this diary haunting you – why don’t you write about it?’ So, that was the genesis; this is why I needed to write about the Holocaust,” concluded Stone.