An amazing life: performing queer intergenerational holocaust testimony

The Amazing Life of Margot Heuman is a work of documentary theatre that stages excerpts from a series of oral history interviews between the lesbian Holocaust historian Anna Hájková and Margot Heuman, a survivor of Auschwitz, Thereseinstadt, Neuengamme, and Bergen-Belsen. The performance premiered at the Brighton Fringe Festival (UK) in summer 2021 and is currently touring museums and universities in the UK, Germany, Canada, and the USA. Heuman had previously given testimony describing her experiences as a Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, but in 2018 she shared for the first time, with Hájková, her experience as a lesbian in the concentration camps. Heuman is perhaps the first and only lesbian Jewish Holocaust survivor to give testimony from this perspective. Working together over several months, and with hours’ worth of transcribed testimony, Hájková and I drafted a script that foregrounded Heuman’s queer experience in concentration camps. We understand theatremaking as a historiographical practice with the potential to destabilise and shift assumptions that have served to invisibilise the experiences of underrepresented voices.

Whereas much documentary theatre does not include the testimony of the interviewer, we decided to include Hájková’s questions and comments alongside Heuman’s testimony so as to layer another story alongside that of Heuman’s past - namely, that of the intergenerational transmission of a uniquely queer history between a lesbian Holocaust survivor and a lesbian historian.

For IFTR 2022, Shifting Centres, this paper details the transdisciplinary approach in which a historian and a theatre director fused historiographical and dramaturgical approaches so as to create a deliberately interventionist queer performance that sought to decentre the traditional heternormative narratives dominating Holocaust history, and fill a critical gap in our understanding of this pivotal tragedy.