Joseph Greenblatt had vengeance in his heart and arsenic in his pocket when he fought the Nazis in the Warsaw Ghetto. He intended to kill as many Germans as he could and not be taken alive to be gassed in a death camp.
That was more than half a century ago. Now at age 84, Greenblatt is one of the few surviving fighters of the ghetto uprising, and he is using his painful yet proud memories to bring authenticity to "The Stroop Report," a play about the defense of the Jewish ghetto.
Greenblatt still shows signs of the determined fighter as he sits at his dining-room table in Anaheim and demonstrates his special method of concocting and detonating a Molotov cocktail. He jokes readily about his past--but the anguish is not so easily erased.
The Passover Seder scene near the play's end moves Greenblatt to tears. "Why is this night different from all other nights?" goes the refrain of a song--reenacted on stage--that Jewish children have chanted for centuries during the ritual holiday meal.
Hearing it reminds Greenblatt why the first night of Passover, 1943, was different for him. On that day the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had begun, and on that night, at that Seder, Greenblatt saw his doomed parents and older brother for the last time.
The play, which runs through Feb. 6 at the Chance Theater, a 54-seat house in an office-industrial block in Anaheim Hills, is the creation of an ethnic tossed salad, a living negation of Adolf Hitler's dream of racial purity through genocide.
The author is Robert Preston Jones, a Gentile novice playwright who lives in Dallas and studied history at a small Methodist college in Arkansas. The director is 26-year-old Oanh Nguyen, who was 2 when his family fled South Vietnam by boat on the day Saigon fell. The company member who pushed first and hardest to stage the play was actress Jennifer K. Majdali, the daughter of a Palestinian Arab.
The special advisor to the production--in some ways, says Nguyen, almost the co-director--is Joseph Greenblatt.
Nguyen had worried that some people might question the validity of a Vietnamese director staging a play about the Holocaust written by a non-Jew. He phoned synagogues and Jewish organizations seeking expert advice on how to keep it authentic.
In Greenblatt, he got an opinionated, unpaid consultant willing to attend numerous rehearsals and not afraid to interrupt with his objections.
"He was funny," Nguyen said. "He was very high-spirited, and he was very ornery."
