Martef (Basement) Theatre for youth at risk perform “The Strength to Tell” in a special evening honoring holocaust survivors who found the strength to testify for prosecution of Adolph Eichmann, as they learn to rebuild their lives looking to the future without shame for the past. Jerusalem, Israel. 07/09/2011.

“On this spot, where I stand before you, the judges of Israel, to prosecute Adolph Eichmann – I am not alone. Standing at my side are six million prosecutors. But they cannot rise to their feet; they cannot point an accusing finger at the glass booth nor shout at the accused sitting inside. I am the accuser. Because their ashes are piled up among the hills of Auschwitz and the fields of Treblinka, washed away in the rivers of Poland and their graves are dispersed throughout the length and width of the land of Europe. Their blood screams out but their voices are unheard. I will therefore be their mouth and read the horrific charges on their behalf.”

The trial of SS-Obersturmbannfuhrer, Adolph Otto Eichmann opened with this statement by the prosecutor, Attorney General, Gideon Hausner, before the Jerusalem District Court, on April 11th, 1961, convened in the Bet Haam auditorium to allow enough seating arrangements for the crowds that gathered to watch, listen, learn and to cry in horror and disbelief.

Eichmann’s prosecution was made possible by his capture in a daring undercover operation carried out by Mossad in which he was found in Argentina under a fraudulent ID, identified, captured and secretly transported to Israel to face justice.
Eichmann was responsible for the facilitating and managing the logistics of mass deportation of Jews to ghettos and extermination camps in German-occupied Eastern Europe. Michael A. Musmanno, a U.S. naval officer in 1945, who had questioned the Nuremberg defendants and would later go on to become a Justice of the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, testified that the late Hermann Goring "made it very clear that Eichmann was the man to determine, in what order, in what countries, the Jews were to die." Eichmann was convicted on fifteen charges of crimes against humanity and war crimes, sentenced to death, hung shortly before midnight on May 31, 1962, cremated and his ashes were scattered in the Mediterranean Sea beyond the territorial waters to ensure that there could be no future memorial and that no country would serve as his final resting place.

More than one hundred witnesses testified in the Eichmann trial. These Holocaust survivors, who had already built new lives for themselves, were, from the witness stand, sucked back into the hell from which they had escaped, back into the memories and nightmares. Back to their families and loved ones who were murdered, back to communities that were destroyed.

The Martef (Basement) Theatre took upon itself a special creative project – “The Strength to Tell” – an evening honoring the true heroes of the Eichmann trial, exactly 50 years later, pointing the spotlights at the altruism and bravery of these survivors, who found the inner strengths required to tell their stories as witnesses in the Eichmann trial. This special evening took place in the same auditorium where Eichmann sat sneering and indifferent in a bulletproof glass booth, on the same stage where survivors testified and broke down crying and in pain, then called the Bet Haam Auditorium, today the Gerard Bachar Center in downtown Jerusalem. The Martef (Basement) Theatre performs, honoring the Holocaust survivors with their interpretation of the inner strengths required to testify, to tell your personal story to the whole world, sometimes for the first time. And this is apparently something that this unique group of youth knows something about …

The Martef (Basement) Theatre was established in 2006 as a social/business venture by the girls at Bet Hatzabarit Shelter in Jerusalem. A school for drama was established in the wine cellar of an old Templer tavern. The student-actors are borderline youth. The goals of the school are two; use of drama for self-empowerment of its actors and the creation of quality theater based on the highest artistic and professional standards. Professional teachers are employed. Student-actors must pass auditions to be accepted and undergo training in drama, voice development, physical abilities and more.

The theatrical evening honoring the Eichmann trial witnesses is how the Martef (Basement) Theatre, whose actors are youth at risk, chose to mark its 5th anniversary. Actors met with the last living witnesses and heard from them, first hand, the ‘testimonies behind the testimonies’, of their difficulties to open up and testify before the world. The Strength to Tell was an educational process for the actors teaching and experiencing them in self-worth, bravery and in finding the inner strengths necessary to stand before the glass partition of indifference and imperviousness, to survive an inferno and build a life, against all odds, to look to the future without shame for the past.

The extraordinary and emotional performance is based on five short films in which the witnesses tell of their personal Holocaust experiences and testimony followed by the theatrical interpretations of the emotional and psychological processes endured by the witnesses before and during the trial. Witnesses Nachum Hoch, Israel Gutman, Yoesef Kleinman, Avraham Aviel and Yehuda Bakon were present in the auditorium with their families as actors Gil Cohen, Avigail Lev, Sofi Gendel, Chaim Sofer, Bar Fuzailov and Tagel Eliyahu, directed by Hagai Aharoni, touched their hearts and souls. Guest of Honor was Speaker of the Knesset, Mr. Reuven Rubi Rivlin who addressed the audience as well as Knesset Member Mr. Zevulun Orlev, Ms. Tamar Raveh-Hausner, daughter of Eichmann prosecutor Gideon Hausner, and Mr. Chaim Guri, author, poet, and journalist who covered the trial proceedings.