Vanessa Finney: Irv, your mother, Felicia, grew up in Poland, and she was 16 years old when the Nazis invaded in 1939. What happened to her during the war, and how did she ultimately make her way to the US?
Irving Lubliner: Well, the whole family's life was very much interrupted as they were evicted from their home and pushed into the ghetto in the little village that they lived in. The family was together for a while, and then certain members of the family, including my mother's father and one of her sisters, were taken away and never seen again. Ultimately, they closed the ghetto in the little town of Pabianice and took my mother and the relatives that were still together with her to the much larger and very overcrowded Lodz ghetto, and she spent time there, and ultimately was taken by train in a cattle car to Auschwitz. And she was there for too long. Every day was too long. If you arrived in Auschwitz and weren't killed immediately, you had a life expectancy of about two months. She survived more than two months there, and ultimately was sent to another camp called Gross-Rosen. Was liberated from Gross-Rosen in May of 1945.
VF: And how did she meet your father and make her way to California?
IL: My mother had lost all of her siblings, eight siblings, but my father had only one sibling, an older brother who survived the Holocaust. And when he was reunited with my father, his fianc茅 met my dad and said, 鈥淚 know a woman from my little village. She survived. I want to introduce you.鈥� And she played matchmaker and brought my parents together. They married in 1946 and came to the US in 1949, and by 1960 my mother was a published author, writing all of her stories in English, which amazes me.
VF: It amazed me reading about it; talk about indomitable spirit. She learned English quickly, and then began publishing and sharing her story.
IL: Exactly, very quickly. And it amazes me that she was raising me and my older brother and working as a seamstress, and somehow found the time to be taking classes to master the English language. I could not beat her in Scrabble; she just had an amazing vocabulary.
VF: Now, when she passed away in 1974 you inherited her writings and recordings, and we have a clip from one of them. This sort of explains, perhaps, why she was so driven to learn the language and publish so widely and share that story.
VOICE OF FELICIA LUBLINER: You stored things in your memory, and you say to each other, let's not ever forget any of it, because if we do come out alive from this, if we do wake up from this insane nightmare, we have to bring the message to make sure that this thing will never happen again.
VF: Irv, you've taken up the baton of carrying this message forward. So besides these works of art that you've created - the book, the audiobook, and now the stage play - you've done a lot of public speaking around the country - just like your mother did about her story, to deepen people's understanding of the Holocaust. What impact have you seen on the audiences that you've met? Do you see people connecting with this story?
IL: Well, I published the book in response to so many teachers, students and parents of students that I spoke to in their schools. Everybody was telling me, 鈥淵ou need to publish these,鈥� and that was a message I heard for about 30 years. Finally in 2019, after retiring from Southern Oregon University in 2014, I knew that the one thing I had to do now that I was retired was publish these stories. We have here in Ashland the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute, and we are one of about 124 such institutes nationwide. I've now spoken for about 86 of them, I believe, which has allowed me to make a lot of people aware of words that my mother wanted to share with me, but also with the world. And I continue to do presentations in middle schools, high schools. I've presented here at SOU. I do feel like this is really something I'm very, very passionate about, want to continue to do. And I'm blessed that Liisa has adapted those writings to create a play, and that Chris did such a beautiful job on the audiobook. I just feel so fortunate that these things are coming my way and enabling me to further the message.
VF: And Lisa, adapting a story from one medium to another is an art form in itself. So what were your responsibilities with this, and did you have any guiding principles as you tried to translate the book into a stage play?
Liisa Ivary: I think the most important thing was to get the gist of each of the separate chapters, which sort of take us through the arc of her experience, going through these dark days and also being resilient enough to recover and thrive without being overcome by the desire for revenge or guilt at survival, all of which she suffered from. So for me, as an old English major and a long-time actor, I thought putting it on stage and theatricalizing it and making it a multimedia experience would work in the schools. Because I feel, as a middle-aged, white lady who's had an easy life, that I could be an ally and an advocate and get this going. I had never adapted a book. You know, I've written other things for the stage, but I've never adapted a book into a play. And I know Chris very well, and I was so taken with the audiobook and the book itself that I really felt passionate, that there was something I could do to get this story to more people and potentially get actual professional productions done of this story, where it would be developed,
VF: And we're going to hear from Chris in just a minute, but first we have a clip from the audiobook. Here's an excerpt of Only Hope, of survivor stories of the Holocaust, with Christine Williams narrating.
Audiobook excerpt: I chose to live, for every hour lived at Auschwitz was a victory, and if I had lost in the end, I would be marching to meet death along with the others - without tears, without dramatic outbursts, but in a silence that shrieked its mute protest into the unheeding heavens and a deaf world.
Christine Williams: I feel like I know Felicia because I've been living with her for a couple of years now. She was an incredible writer, and that's the thing that struck me from the very beginning when I first read the stories. I've actually narrated other memoirs of the Holocaust, and have done a fair amount of digging into that time period. I'm really fascinated by it, and something about her stories - the way that she wrote and structured and created a whole way of bringing people into that experience - was unlike any other that I've read before. So I've been very passionate myself about this as a perfect way to help people understand the humans at the center of this experience and how like us today they were then. It helps us take seriously our responsibility to not let that happen again.
"She had a marvelous sense of story structure."Chris Williams, narrator and actor, "Only Hope"
VF: Can you explain more about the unique way she had of structuring the stories?
CW: Well, it was when I learned from Irv that she had done stand up comedy routines at his elementary school parents night talent shows that made me have my aha moment. Like, 鈥淲ell, of course, because she was such a great storyteller, and she had a sense of humor, even inside those horrific experiences.鈥� And by humor, I mean her humanity, her way of capturing an image of an event and of relating to it in this way that draws you into it in the best way that comics do - of helping you, putting you right there in that experience, and you know you're being taken care of. She had a marvelous sense of story structure - the way that she shaped the stories and draws people in. We get to go with this person that we trust, and we are changed through the experience.
VF: I think I had a little glimpse into what you mean about that mastery of storytelling when I was watching one of her videos. She described arriving at Auschwitz in a cattle car, and there was a sign over the gate saying, "Work shall set you free.鈥� And she said, 鈥淥nly later would we realize that it should have said, 鈥楢bandon hope, all ye who enter here,鈥欌�� quoting Dante鈥�.Liisa, did you have something to add?
LI: Just that Chris touched on the core of what drew me to this, and you're talking about the cattle cars. And she'd say, 鈥淪o follow me, if you can, if you will, into Auschwitz, because you are with me. Now, what would you do if it were your life? What would you do? How would you behave?鈥� And one of the really deathly funny things that she said was, " ... and you just have this little piece of bread. And you're thinking, 'Well, if they were going to put you to death, why the hell would they give you bread?'鈥�
"Death looked at you from the barrels of guns, death looked at you from the doctors examining you.鈥�Felicia Lubliner
VF: It defies logic.
LI: I mean, it's so awfully funny. And so you really challenge yourself. And you think, 鈥淲ell, I wouldn't have just surrendered鈥�, you know? And she talks about Anne Frank, saying, "That's what it was like. You're looking into the barrel of a gun and the Doberman dogs and the German shepherds, and you pick up your bundle and go." You realize that you really don't know until you're there.
VF: And she had the poetry to say something like, "Death looked at you from the barrels of guns, death looked at you from the doctors examining you.鈥� Now with the stage reading you just produced, the set is very spare, so the photos that are projected above the stage and the audio elements play a crucial role. Tell me about that soundscape.
LI: Well, this was a really rich tapestry, because it was a multimedia production that I conceived and I found a wonderful stage manager from Camelot and OSF named AJ Ark who layered in the sounds of rain, distant gunshots, dogs barking, the sound of wind, the sound of terrible, frightening things, but so low, like the film 鈥淶one of Interest,鈥� but he created the world that you would experience at Auschwitz. And then AJ McCalla, who actually is one of your Classics and News Service hosts, he created underscoring, almost like an opera. He created and found pieces sometimes that he would layer one on top of the other, but most importantly, to take us through the story, the whole arc of the story, from each chapter heading so that the audience would know where they were and then come underneath the big moments, sometimes with multiple pieces playing, one over the other.
VF: It seemed really effective in setting the scene. Chris, I wonder what your experience was like taking two different approaches with Felicia's stories, first with the audiobook narration, and now with a one woman play.
CW: The way that I look at it, and the way that maybe it's easiest to understand, is it鈥檚 the difference between film acting and stage acting. So there's a difference of scale. The intentions are exactly the same, but it's more focused in. So the difference is that I was already deep into the story and the character, but actually physicalizing her and physicalizing the story gave me an even deeper insight than working on the book as a narrator, and so that was the big difference for me.
LI: She did a magnificent job. She was in the house, she was in her (Felicia's) childhood home, she was in the camp, she was in the ghetto, she was in those places making them live.
VF: She brought it to life.
LI: Yeah, she really did. I couldn't have been happier.
You can learn more about 鈥淥nly Hope: A Survivor鈥檚 Story of the Holocaust鈥� and the life of Felicia Lubliner at onlyhopebook.com, where there are recorded presentations and book excerpts.
This interview has been lightly edited for clarity.
