Every Tuesday night in Manhattan, a circle of chairs was arranged to hold a universe of intersecting worlds. Around the table sat a remarkably diverse group: four older adults born into the thick of the Second World War, and ten New York City high school students hailing from a kaleidoscope of backgrounds; Black, BIPOC, Latino, German, Christian, Buddhist, Jewish, and non-Jewish.
On our very first evening together, the air was dense with the palpable hesitation that always accompanies an encounter with profound historical trauma. Many participants were visibly wary of the immense emotional and temporal commitment required for a project of this magnitude. Breaking through this tentative atmosphere was Robert Nussbaum. Robert, the eldest of our older adults and a survivor from Budapest, Hungary, possessed an innate charisma that quickly established him as the “social glue” of our ensemble. With an abrupt, refreshing lack of political correctness, he looked across the circle at the teenagers and asked: “Well, I’d like to know, why are you here?”
What followed was a uniquely sincere, fascinating conversation that set the tone for the next eight months. Some students spoke of deep family roots that have gone through the Holocaust. Others, who were not Jewish at all, explained with striking vulnerability that they simply wanted to understand the intimate history of another people. Yet, the hesitation did not vanish instantly.
Cordula Hahn, whose parents had fled Czechoslovakia for the Netherlands immediately following Kristallnacht, and who was herself born into the complicated life of a toddler during the war, looked at the group and admitted: “I am really not quite sure I want to be here. I don’t know if I want to live the Holocaust every day.” And yet, Cordula kept coming back.
I recognized that this was the first major victory of the process. Something within our evolving therapeutic and communal framework was already powerful enough to hold all the ambiguity, resistance, and doubt of its members, slowly weaving a safety net capable of catching every participant.
This desperate hunger and the haunting weight of survival did not vanish with liberation; they became an invisible inheritance.
Inherited Legacies + Sacred Script
After years of grappling with my identities as an Israeli-Jewish drama therapist living in the U.S., and a third-generation descendant of the Holocaust, I found myself joining Witness Theater, an extraordinary intergenerational drama therapy program that brings together Holocaust survivors and high school youth to sit in community, learn, and transform personal survival testimonies into a shared public performance of collective remembrance. As a professional theater director and drama therapist, this was an unavoidable convergence of my personal, theatrical, and clinical worlds.
My maternal grandfather, Zeev Shwartz (later Zeev Shehory) was born in Budapest, Hungary. He was persecuted as a young child, witnessing the systematic tearing apart of his community. Many of his siblings and extended family members were murdered by Hitler’s regime. Like many others he endured the terrifying reality written by the Nazis and ultimately ended up in Auschwitz, where his identity was reduced to a number etched permanently into his skin. He survived the ghettos and camps by raw luck and enduring grueling forced labor, peeling oranges for Nazi officers. He stayed alive by nourishing his growing body with the thin string of bitter pith and peel left behind.
This desperate hunger and the haunting weight of survival did not vanish with liberation; they became an invisible inheritance. My grandfather passed away when my mother was only seven years old, meaning I never had the chance to meet him or hear his voice. Yet, like so many other surviving Jewish families, we learned that trauma does not require a physical presence to travel across generations.
The Power of Language + Intergenerational Bridges
From our very first session, we made a deliberate choice to refer to our older participants as “adults” rather than survivors. While “survivor” honors incredible endurance, it can inadvertently flatten a person’s identity; calling them adults honored the rich, multifaceted lives they built after 1945, ensuring they were recognized as whole people rather than solely by the catastrophes of their childhoods. This year, our core group consisted of four remarkable individuals: Cordula Hahn, Robert Nussbaum, Eugene Ginter, and Lisa Holzkenner. During the war, they were all young children between the ages of two and seven—a haunting reality that constantly resurfaced in our discussions and ultimately became the leading narrative of our play.
Meeting them across a seventy-year age gap were ten brave high school students. This vast chronological divide was quietly compressed into nothingness through weekly interactions. Rather than looking up to the adults as static historical monuments, the students formed genuine, fluid relationships marked by mutual honor, spontaneous laughter, and deep identification. Driven by a youth population that proved boundlessly inquisitive and emotionally sensitive, this profound coming together of generations transformed historical distance into a deeply shared experience.
Trauma does not require a physical presence to travel across generations.
Trauma-Informed Frameworks + Aesthetic Distance
Operating under a trauma-informed lens, it was clear that throwing these two distinct populations into a room together without scaffolded preparation would be irresponsible. Before the joint sessions could safely commence, specialized workshops were held for the high school students alone, establishing a container for what was to come.
First, the teenagers covered the necessary parameters of Holocaust history, anchoring themselves in the structural context required to hold the testimonies they were about to receive. From there, the preparation deepened into an intensive workshop on the nature of psychological trauma. The students learned how trauma physically manifests in a room. How it can show up as a sudden silence, hyperarousal, emotional flooding, or a quiet somatic collapsing. Together, actionable strategies were mapped out: how to recognize when an adult was becoming overwhelmed, how to offer grounded, steady support, and critically, how the students could protect and honor their own psychological boundaries.
Safeguarding the students’ mental health was just as important as honoring the adults, especially as they took on the heavy mantle of staging these complex testimonies. We utilized the drama therapy principle of aesthetic distance to maintain a healthy boundary between the student’s reality (“Me”) and their dramatic persona (“Not-Me”). Through intentional role-induction and de-roling rituals, we kept them in a therapeutic balance, allowing them to step deeply into history without becoming emotionally flooded.
From Story Sharing to Embodied Staging
Our eight-month journey was divided into distinct, sequential phases. The initial phase focused entirely on group building to establish a profound sense of safety. Once this container was secure, we moved into a ten-week story-sharing phase. Each week, the adults unfolded a different “chapter” of their lives, tracing their lineages from pre-war family history through the depths of the Holocaust and into their modern lives in New York.
In these sessions, students were explicitly cast in the active role of interviewers rather than passive consumers of trauma. By asking intuitive and purely curious questions, they co-created the space, while the rest of the circle practiced active listening. For some of these multicultural students, this project was their very first encounter with the historical reality of the Holocaust, and for the adults, an intense feeling of community and shared experiences was formed. Many wept, hugged, and continued endless conversations about the atrocities our adults endured as young children.
At the conclusion of each verbal session, we moved onto our feet, utilizing drama therapy interventions like embodiment, psychodrama, and dramatic sculpting to stage a chosen scene from that day’s testimony. Crucially, the adults held directorial agency, while I quietly provided the therapeutic scaffolding to ensure everyone remained grounded and emotionally secure. They cast the students to play figures from their memories, directed the physical staging, and chose whether to physically participate or observe from an aesthetic distance.
From a trauma-informed perspective, this is profoundly empowering. Trauma strips an individual of control, rendering them a helpless object to external cruelty. By stepping into the role of director, the adult retrieves the power to navigate and mold their own narrative, physically changing the internal script of their trauma. Two specific vignettes illustrate this clinical transformation.
The first centers on Eugene Ginter, who was sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau and tattooed as a mere four-year-old. Though he and his father managed to miraculously stay alongside each other during their time at the camp, they were torn apart during the chaos of the death march near liberation, leaving five-year-old Eugene to survive the front lines alone. Reunited with his mother at age six, they traveled through active minefields until they finally found his father working on a post-war farm. Eugene recalled that the war didn’t truly end for him until that morning when he crawled into bed and snuggled between both parents in absolute safety.
Recognizing a lifelong longing, I suggested we relive that moment through staging. Eugene took the directorial lead, casting a German student as his mother and another student as his father. Sitting in the center of the room, Eugene closed his eyes as the high school students replicated the somatic gestures he softly described: his father slightly squeezing his arm, and his mother gently rubbing his back. There, in the heart of Manhattan, 90-year-old Eugene felt the physical echo of protection from the parents he had not seen since they passed away.
Our second vignette involves Lisa Holzkenner, a psychoanalyst born into a respected, mystical Kabbalistic family in Morocco, whose father was a boxing champion and underground smuggler of Jewish youth. Despite spending decades clinically treating Holocaust survivors, the tailored safety of our drama therapy circle allowed Lisa to share an experience she had never told anyone before.
She recounted that as an eight-year-old girl, she was surrounded, beaten, and called a “dirty Jew” by neighborhood children. Beyond the physical trauma, the experience left her in a state of profound existential confusion, unable to square the violence with her grandfather’s spiritual teaching: “Do not hate, we are all the same blood.”
To process this buried memory, Lisa needed to watch it from an aesthetic distance. She directed the students to replay the scene, gradually adding historical and imaginary characters to rewrite the logic-less scenario she had internalized. Watching her redirect this memory was deeply therapeutic for the entire ensemble. The students witnessed healing in the making—a physical transition from tearful constriction to clear, dignified breathing and absolute narrative ownership.
Ultimately, this physical embodiment allowed the Adults to safely access and unlock memories that had been locked away, while casting the high school students allowed the youth to participate in a restorative act of deep empathy and compassion.
Driven by a youth population that proved boundlessly inquisitive and emotionally sensitive, this profound coming together of generations transformed historical distance into a deeply shared experience.
The Rehearsal Lab: Expanding the Role Repertoire
Once the story-sharing phase concluded, it was my responsibility to cultivate and weave these four distinct testimonies into a cohesive, original theater script. My objective as a playwright was to keep their historical truths completely intact, using dramatic structure and theatrical staging not just to educate, but to let these four specific, intimate lives echo the vast, collective magnitude of the Holocaust.
The rehearsal period shifted our group dynamic from a fluid therapeutic circle into a highly focused, rigorous “work mode” that ultimately spanned over 150 hours. Yet, within this demanding process, the rehearsals became an active learning laboratory where students wrestled with complex historical storylines. They frequently asked intuitive questions, like why they needed to scream in a scene when the historical moment was silent; I explained that they were giving a theatrical voice to a child who, in 1943, could not afford to make a sound.
This intense artistic process allowed these teenagers, who were actively building their own real-life identities, to explore Robert Landy’s “role repertoire”—the diverse parts of the self we play in life. Within this shared, creative learning environment, they expanded their internal vocabulary of roles by stepping into the shoes of caregivers, historical oppressors, victims, and heroes. Meanwhile, the Adults retained full agency to “correct” our work, sharpening historical details and collaborating with me to rewrite scenes, ensuring they molded exactly how they wanted their lives portrayed on stage.
The Fifth Witness: Performing the Tapestry
Culminating the eight-month journey, The Fifth Witness brought the entire group, teens and adults, together on stage before packed audiences spotlighting directorial and therapeutic choices such as having the Adults physically on stage throughout the entire performance to symbolize absolute ownership of their stories.
At carefully crafted moments, they stepped directly into the action to swap places with the students portraying their younger selves. In these moments, the student actors transitioned into “Doubles,” a psycho-dramatic concept where actors offer support that did not exist during the original experience, beautifully bridging biography and restorative performance. This theatrical world was further enriched by an original score composed by Lisa Holzkenner’s granddaughter, a continuous visual projection of family photographs, and historical vocal recordings of the Adults from their youth.
The audience too was not left behind and was given an active role in the performance, as in therapeutic theater, the audience is never a passive consumer; they were explicitly called upon to step into the sacred position of a collective witnessing body, providing the communal validation that historical trauma demands. The atmosphere was unapologetically intense, holding up the unvarnished horrors of the Holocaust while weaving in moments of playfulness and childhood humor. This creative duality sparked a profound transformation for both generations on stage. The adults found a liberating, restorative experience and the comforting certainty that their legacies were secure, while the high school students gained an internalized, lifelong sense of empathy and global responsibility.
What happened on that stage proves that to keep memory alive, education must move from the purely cognitive to the somatic and the relational. This is the precise promise of drama therapy in schools. By replacing passive, detached learning with active, trauma-informed exploration, we ensure that younger generations do not just view history as a static monument to the past. They deeply understand it, carry it with them, and become active partners in keeping the memory alive.
Witness Theater was conceived by Irit and Ezra Dagan and developed by JDC-Eshel in Israel. It was brought to New York in 2012 by Selfhelp Community Services, Inc. This year’s Witness Theater Program is a collaboration of Selfhelp, UJA-Federation of New York, and Yeshivah of Flatbush’s Joel Braverman High School. The program also receives generous support from Carol and Carl Hess, the Miriam and Arthur Diamond Charitable Trust, and the Kupferberg Foundation, with assistance from the Conference on Jewish Material Claims against Germany, supported by the German Federal Ministry of Finance.
