Editor:

I attended a performance of a play, Requiem, previewed in the Journal ("But to Love," Jan. 10), at the Unitarian Fellowship and left angry and disappointed. It was the ego trip of a man claiming to be a survivor of the camp Theresienstadt. Nothing in that play led me to believe he was ever in Theresienstadt. A background conversation between two Nazis wondering why there was a children's center, why bother keeping children alive, would never have happened there.

The camp was a "show" camp, created as theatre to show the Red Cross how nice the camps were. Children were props; any Nazi working there would know that. When Red Cross came there were concerts, fake shops, carts of bread on the streets and children happily holding loaves, while the bulk of the inmates were jammed into buildings out of sight.
Over 60,000 Jews were crammed into what had been a town of 7,000 people. Deaths from starvation, torture, public hangings and shootings were common.

Men, women and children were all separated, but the hero/author claims to nightly private meetings with his lover, the children's nurse. She becomes pregnant and he talks her out of aborting although the fate of a pregnant Jewess is certain. He claims to know in advance (this makes no sense) he's being sent to Auschwitz and lets her and his child from a previous marriage accompany him as though they could actually pick and choose. Never mind that in 1943 it was known in the camps what was happening at Auschwitz-Birkenau, and he was taking them to certain death.

I am outraged that this play was presented as fact. Clearly none of the people involved had done any research, and because this man portrays himself as a cheerful optimist, they just wanted to believe this faker's pretty picture.

Sylvia De Rooy, Westhaven