Memory of Nations Theatre

For the fourth year, I have been performing alongside other young actors in the Memory of Nations Theatre. The theatre works with an extensive archive of oral histories recorded from witnesses to twentieth-century events, primarily victims of the Holocaust, Nazism and Communism.

Each September, we—both scriptwriters and actors—choose one or more witnesses’ stories. We meet the witnesses and transform their experiences into a performance set against the broader context of Czech and world history. At the end of the school year, we present the finished work to the public.

I feel especially at home in this combination of creativity, standing up for what is right, and preserving the memory of both quiet and extraordinary acts of courage.

Through my work with the theatre, I have developed a strong understanding of these historical events for my age. I met both Milena Grenfell-Baines and Jan Jelínek in person and performed in productions based on their lives, which is why I know their stories so closely.

Milena Grenfell-Baines was ten years old when she left without her parents, travelling only with her sister on one of the trains organised by Sir Nicholas George Winton to live with a family she had never met in Great Britain. Winton was a British stockbroker and humanitarian who helped save 669 children—most of them Jewish—from the occupied territory of Czechoslovakia in 1939 by arranging their journey to the United Kingdom, protecting them from deportation to concentration camps.

Jan Jelínek spent the entire war in hiding with his Jewish mother and brother at his grandfather’s home in the countryside.