Ensuring we do not forget

The diary of Jewish teenager Petr Ginz is a little-known account of life under Nazi occupation, but the story is being brought to the masses thanks to a Shropshire teacher. Russell Roberts meets the amateur award-winning playwright.

The explosion of the space shuttle Columbia in 2003 was an international tragedy.

But it led to a significant and inspiring discovery; Israeli astronaut Ilan Ramon had taken with him a drawing by a young Jewish boy from Hitler’s death-camps, and the news of the shuttle’s destruction led directly to the discovery of the boy’s diary, lying forgotten in a Prague attic.

Just like the Diary of Anne Frank, Petr Ginz’s journal paints a vivid picture of ordinary family life at an extraordinary time.

Now, in the first dramatisation to be approved by Ginz’s family, the diary has been adapted by Alex Went - an English teacher at Shrewsbury School.

Having just returned from the Prague Fringe Festival at the weekend, he has arguably faced his greatest test - delivering a play to a Czech audience based on one of their best-loved national icons.

Alex directed a group of students from the school and Shrewsbury High School to perform the adaptation in front of hundreds of people, and says the project has been a promise fulfilled to himself.

He also hopes his work is a testament to the legacy of Ginz who met his death aged just 16 on April 9, 1944, at the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz Birkenau.

“It was February 1, 2003, and would have been Petr Ginz’s 75th birthday,” says Alex, recalling the moment the project sprang to life.

“My friend Pavel Cechak agreed that the story of Petr’s diary and the unusual circumstances of its discovery would make an excellent film, and last August, staying in a little cottage on the Czech-Polish border, I promised myself to put together a screenplay.

“But I’d also been toying with taking a play to the Prague Fringe the following May, and in the end the two projects became one.”

Permission was obtained from Petr Ginz’s only surviving relative, his younger sister, Chava Pressburger, and from the translator of the English edition, Elena Lappin. Between October and December last year a first script came into being.

“Since then, my cast of 14 boys and girls from Shrewsbury School and Shrewsbury High School have worked pretty much ceaselessly to prepare what is in effect a very complex adaptation, a fusion of the enormity of war with intimate personal recollection.

“Ginz’s diary is fascinating for this reason,” says Alex.

The play depicts Prague as an occupied city, with the feared Reinhart Heydrich at its helm.

“Streets and newspapers are filled with acts of sabotage, courage and defiance against a brutal regime,” says Alex.

“But as the months pass, a terrible fear descends. Friends and relations are summoned every day to the Transport trains which will take them first to Theresienstadt and later to the concentration camps in Poland.

“But despite the terror, young Petr Ginz lives his life as he always has: drawing, writing, joking, experimenting; he wants to be a scientist, a novelist, a world-famous explorer.

“His diary is a record of extraordinary personal resistance, and a testament to a loving family who wait with him, while the world turns dizzily around, for a knock upon the door.”

Alex, who has written and co-written several adaptations of plays and musicals including Jekyll - based on Jekyll and Hyde - and Harry, based on Shakespeare’s Hamlet, admits the diary has represented one of his greatest challenges.

He has a reputation as an adapter of work for Fringe theatre and recently won praise for his version of Bohumil Hrabal’s Too Loud a Solitude. He also won a Fringe First Award at the Edinburgh Fringe in 1995.

But it is not just the Czech audiences who can enjoy Alex’s work, as the play is to be performed for a county audience at Shrewsbury School next month.

For many years Ginz’s diary has hidden in the shadow of his better-known counterpart Anne Frank.

Alex says: “It’s been exhausting, nervously and physically, but there is recompense for the months of hard work.

“At a time when interest in Anne Frank’s diary has reached a new peak, Petr Ginz’s writing has provided us all with a new witness to history.

“He has now become the guide and he has given some very fortunate children the opportunity to perform in front of his own sister in his home city of Prague. That is the greatest reward of all.”

* The Diary of Petr Ginz will take place in the Ashton Theatre, at Shrewsbury School, between July 1-3. Tickets can be reserved by calling 01743 280822.