Sparks Fly Upward

The Factory Action - February 27, 1943

“Now the Jews of Berlin will finally be deported. On February 28 they are to be assembled, first, in camps and then deported in groups of up to 2,000 per day.”              ~Joseph Goebbels~[1]

Saturday, February 27, 2011 marks the 68^th anniversary of one of the most extensive and brutal arrests of Jews in Berlin during the Holocaust.  

In the early morning of February 27, 1943 the SS engaged in a massive raid, attempting to arrest the last Jews remaining in Berlin.  Those arrested were taken to assembly centers around the city, where they were forced to wait, sometimes for days, before being deported to Auschwitz. In the days that followed the arrests, the non-Jewish wives of Jewish men picked up during the factory action staged a protest in front of the building where their husbands were being held.  Most of these men were ultimately released.  The rest of the thousands of Jews arrested that day were sent directly from Berlin to Auschwitz.

The arrest came to be known as the “Factory Action” or “Fabrik-aktion”.  The protest came to be known as the “Rosenstrasse Protest.”

Some Jews were warned of the impending raid by their bosses, and thereby escaped arrest and deportation to Auschwitz.  Of this, Goebbels wrote in his diary:

 “The scheduled arrest of all Jews on one day has proven a flash in the pan because of the shortsighted behavior of industrialists who warned the Jews in time.  We therefore failed to lay our hands on about 4,000.  They are now wandering about Berlin without homes, are not registered with the police and are naturally quite a public danger.  I ordered the police, Wehrmacht, and the Party to do everything possible to round these Jews up as quickly as practicable.”[2]

The Factory Action is depicted in the second act of The Sparks Fly Upward.

 

 

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[1] Diana Schulle, The Rosenstrasse Protest, in Beate Meyer, Hermann Simon, and Chana Schütz, Jews in Nazi Berlin: From Kristallnacht to Liberation (The University of Chicago Press 2009) p. 159 (quoting Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels: Sämtliche Fragmente, ed. Elke Fröhlich, part 2, vol. 7 (Munich, 1993), p. 369).

[2] Joseph Goebbels, The Goebbels Diaries, ed./translated Louis P. Lochner (Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1948) p. 294.

 

Our director, Timothy X. Troy

I though I would blog on some days about our fabulous staff for the production of The Sparks Fly Upward.

Our director in 2008, who is also planning to direct the stage production in 2012, is Timothy X. Troy. Tim is Professor and Chair of Theatre Arts at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. In 2008 he travelled to Des Moines to direct the production and did an absolutely fabulous job of turning my somewhat cinematic vision into a stage vision.

Tim received his Bachelor of Arts degree, The History of Ideas - modern, from Lawrence University. He earned the Master of Fine Arts in Theatre Arts/Directing from the University of Iowa, where he directed the original production of five new plays from
the Iowa Playwrights Workshop. Professor Troy¹s regular contribution to Lawrence's Freshman Studies program was honored with the Freshman Teaching Prize in 2004. Since serving as Visiting Professor at Trinity College-Dublin
in 2005, Mr. Troy has recently turned his attention to playwrighting. The Playwright¹s Center in Minneapolis will present his latest play, Radio and Juliet, in March of 2011.

Here is what Tim has to say about Sparks and his involvement in its development:
"It's been a privilege to be part of the SPARKS project. The opera matches all my core values as both an artist and a citizen. It tells an important story that we need to tell and retell to help us remain vigilant in the face of oppression. It's an opera with emotional depth and intellectual integrity that reminds us that all the great challenges we face happen in the context of love of family and our attachment to neighbors and friends. Most importantly, Cathy chose the medium of music drama to tell the story - the
complete artwork that dazzles our eyes, enriches our ears, engages our mind, and stirs our hearts. Being part of the team that first brought SPARKS to life for an audience remains one of the most important projects in my career. I dearly hope we find a way to expand our ability to share this important work with more audiences who need its richness, depth, and humanity to help them navigate the perils that beset us."



Help us start our journey. Donate now at: www.thesparksflyupward.org
Any donation, no matter how small, is welcome and needed!

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United Nations Holocaust Memorial Ceremony
Rescheduled from January 27, 2011 to February 10, 2011,
10 a.m.- 12 Noon

Every year the United Nations participates in the International Day of Commemoration in memory of the Holocaust. This year the ceremony at the U.N. was postponed due to weather in New York. The ceremony has been rescheduled for February 10, 2011 in the U.N. General Assembly Hall. To register you must email them by February 7, 2011 at Holocaustrememberance@un.org. This year's theme is "Women and the Holocaust: Courage and Compassion." For more information go to http://www.un.org/en/holocaustremembrance/2011/Calendarevents.shtml

No news this last week on the production front, but I'll keep everyone posted!

Recent world attention has been focused on the Ivory Coast in Africa, with U.N. officials recently expressing concern over the potential for genocide. NPR ran a story about the situation today. http://www.npr.org/2011/01/24/133178384/foreign-policy-in-ivory-coast-a-genocide-problem

The BBC has a good background on the situation at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-11916590

In news about the Cleveland production, I made some progress last week. I spoke to the agent for a musician we would love to have involved in the project, and I had a long chat with the theater where we hope to have the production. Both very productive conversations!

Not much progress this week towards the 2012 production thanks largely to my law school obligations. I did try to get in touch with a well known musician (to be identified perhaps later) with ties to the Holocaust, whose participation would be especially meaningful.

In genocide awareness news this week, all have been following the referendum on independence for Southern Sudan. For an interesting new project put together by George Clooney see The Satellite Sentinel Project, which "combines satellite imagery analysis and field reports with Google's Map Maker technology to deter the resumption of war between North and South Sudan. The project provides an early warning system to deter mass atrocities by focusing world attention and generating rapid responses on human rights and human security concerns."

www.satsentinel.org

This is my first post of what I hope will be regularl posts leading up to the next production of The Sparks Fly Upward, a musical drama/opera that follows three families in Berlin during the Holocaust.

We had a very successful premiere of the piece along with educational efforts by our Foundation in 2008. Now, we are turning our attention to a production in November 2012 in Cleveland, Ohio that we anticipate will be simulcast throughout the U.S., and perhaps the world.

This blog will track our progress as we take steps toward this production. My next post will be about our progress so far, and then we'll move forward!

Cathy

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

Here is what the German Resistance Memorial Center has to say about Dietrich Bonhoeffer.  http://www.gdw-berlin.de/bio/ausgabe_mit-e.php?id=22 "Dietrich Bonhoeffer (February 04, 1906 - April 09, 1945)		Dietrich Bonhoeffer
Bonhoeffer, son of the renowned psychiatrist and neurologist Karl Bonhoeffer, became a university pastor in Berlin after studying theology and receiving an advanced degree. As early as 1933 he was regarded as a resolute opponent of the National Socialists; in his essay "The Church Before the Jewish Question" he established that Christians have a duty to resist unlawful actions by the state. From 1935 to 1937, he directed a Confessional Church seminary first located in Zingst, Pommerania, and later in Finkenwalde near Stettin. He was a leading theologist of this religious opposition movement. The courses Bonhoeffer taught decisively influenced the theological development of every participant. In 1937 Reich Church Minister Hans Kerrl prohibited these seminars. In 1938 Bonhoeffer's brother-in-law Hans von Dohnanyi informed Bonhoeffer of his plans for a coup. Pressed into service in the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counter Intelligence of the Armed Forces High Command in 1940, Bonhoeffer repeatedly traveled abroad to make contact with the Allied governments. In early April 1943 he was arrested. For two years he was held without trial in Berlin's Tegel prison. It was here that he wrote his most notable theological works. In February 1945, Dietrich Bonhoeffer was brought to the Flossenbürg concentration camp where he was murdered on April 9, 1945, after being sentenced by an SS summary court-martial." **** In 2006 PBS aired a great documentary about Bonhoeffer called Bonhoeffer which can be rented or purchased.  The film's producers also have a website about him at www.bonhoeffer.com.

Hans von Dohnanyi

Here is what the German Resistance Memorial Center has to say about Hans von Dohnanyi.   http://www.gdw-berlin.de/bio/ausgabe_mit-e.php?id=330 "Hans von Dohnanyi (January 01, 1902 - April 09, 1945)		Hans von Dohnanyi
Hans von Dohnanyi studied law in Berlin, gained his doctorate in Hamburg in 1926 and passed the second final law examination in 1928. He worked in the Reich Ministry of Justice from 1929 until the spring of 1932, and then again from June 1933 on. In his position as personal adviser to Franz Gürtner and later as head of Gürtner’s ministerial office, Hans von Dohnanyi systematically gathered information on National Socialist violations of justice and crimes in the concentration camps. From the beginning of 1938 he was in contact with opponents of Hitler in the military. Dohnanyi, Ludwig Beck, Hans Oster and Erwin von Witzleben were leading figures in the preparations for a coup attempt against Hitler’s regime in September 1938. Hans von Dohnanyi was forced to resign from the Ministry in 1938 under pressure from the Party Bureau of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP). He was transferred to the Supreme Court of the Reich in Leipzig. In the fall of 1939 Oster asked for him to be transferred to the Office for Foreign Affairs/Counterintelligence in the Armed Forces High Command. The intention was to enable Dohnanyi to pursue his work on the preparations for a coup against Hitler. His job gave him access early on to information about the mass extermination of the European Jews. He passed on reports on the deportation of Jews written by his brother-in-law, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, to high-ranking military officers in order to motivate them to intervene. In the spring of 1942 he decided that at least some of the families threatened with deportation should be brought to safety. The plan was that the persons under threat should obtain permits to travel abroad to neutral countries by passing them off as spies working for Counterintelligence. The operation was called “Enterprise Seven” because it was designed in the first instance to help just seven people. On April 5, 1943 Hans von Dohnanyi was arrested in his office for alleged currency offences. Oster, who tried to shield him, was removed from his post. After the unsuccessful coup attempt of July 20, 1944, the Gestapo discovered a part of the documents on National Socialist crimes that Hans von Dohnanyi had collected before 1938. Dohnanyi became seriously ill during his long imprisonment in the Gestapo prison in Prinz-Albrecht-Straße in Berlin. Hans von Dohnanyi was sentenced by an SS court martial on account of his involvement in the preparations for the coup against Hitler and murdered in Sachsenhausen concentration camp, probably on April 9, 1945."

Operation Valkyrie

In light of the popularity of the movie “Valkyrie,” and our organization’s focus on resisting genocide, I thought it would be interesting to post where readers of this blog might find information about the real Operation Valkyrie.

There is a German Resistance Memorial Center located in Berlin at Stauffenbergstrasse 13 – 14.  The Center has interesting material available on-line (in English), including information on Operation Valkyrie.  The web address is http://www.gdw-berlin.de/b12/start-e.php.

 There is a recent documentary about operation Valkyrie called Operation Valkyrie: The Stauffenberg Plot to Kill Hitler.  The website about this documentary is  http://www.schwartzcompany.com/valkyrie_2008.pdf.  It is available on netflix.

 The United States Holocaust Museum has a webpage about Non-Jewish Resistance to the Nazi Regime which recommends the following book about the event: Galante, Pierre, and Eugene Silianoff. Operation Valkyrie: The German Generals' Plot against Hitler. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2002.

 On an interesting personal note, two of the leading individuals involved in resistance attempts against Hitler were Hans von Dohnanyi and Dietrich Bonhoeffer, father and uncle/godfather of the former Music Director and Conductor of the Cleveland Orchestra, Christoff von Dohnanyi.  I had the good fortune to attend Christoff von Dohnanyi’s brilliant premiere with the Cleveland Orchestra and many concerts thereafter every time I visited my family in Cleveland, where I grew up.

The resistance activities of these two men are worthy of separate posts, and so next week I will post something about each of them.