Lest we forget

Adapted from REPLIKA  "A Performance Scenario" by Józef Szajna, Polish painter, set designer, playwright, director, theatre theoretician and graphic artist.  Szajna represented Poland at the Venice Biennale in 1970 and 1990. 

During the Holocaust, Szajna was imprisoned at Auschwitz and Buchenwald concentration camps, surviving solitary confinement, starvation and torture.  Szajna, translated by E.J. Czerwinski, wrote in the Warsaw, 1987, Playwright's Note, of REPLIKA

"The name Replika does not simply mean repetition of an historical event.  

Perhaps it is more like a history lesson.  From the Holocaust 

to the mass suicide of madmen by nuclear explosions is only a step away.  

Through Replika I warn our times and indict power and violence.  

Power can never be right:  the rights of man must always overpower power. 

I dedicate Replika, on the one hand, 

to all those murdered by fascism; 

and, on the other hand, 

to all those governing today 

as a pledge of honor, 

obligating them and others after them 

to uphold that pledge, 

that such horror will never happen again."  

Presented at the Bryn Mawr College Student Theater Festival