Letter from writer and director Robert Williams

It is with great pleasure that I invite you to get to know a play I’ve written.

Unknown Heroes

The play takes place in Berlin in 1943 and explores two areas of WWII phenomena that are rarely spoken of. To my knowledge, a play that deals with female Jewish Resistance fighters and Germans who oppose the Nazi Regime enough to die for their beliefs has never been written. The story centers on two such characters, both women.

The Jewish Resistance fighter is a German that risks her life every day to defeat the Nazi machinery responsible for killing so many members of her race. The second German woman is a Cabaret singer who, while trapped in a relationship with a brutal SS Captain, sheds secret tears of pain knowing that her fellow countrymen are murdering millions, mostly Jews, during shootings in German-occupied countries. It would have been a rare moment in time for these two women to meet.

I have been immersed in studying the Holocaust for many years and continue to be deeply pained by the killing of 12 million people, six million of which were Jews. I have collected a large number of documentaries from around the world and many books that report in detail on the long journey of despair that Jewish European citizens endured. Although I am Italian and was raised Catholic, I have a deep love and respect for Judaism. I’ve also thoroughly studied the history of Germany from the beginning of the 20th Century until the 1960s. I and many others have always been startled by how German citizens were completely seduced by Hitler and forced into events created by the Führer and his fellow aids. The question of questions is how could a group of people like the Germans, so refined and evolved, masters in so many fields of art and, above all, lovers of the intimate essence of nature, be drawn into the dark events of WWII?

What many don’t know is that a considerable number of Germans died opposing the horrors of the Nazi machine. They are not remembered as heroes.

My play was written out of a personal wish to create an imaginary place in time when, for once, a German (Klara) and a German Jew (Miriam) could meet, look at each other beyond their ethnic imprint and the tragedy that linked them during WWII, and find the primal love that is common to all souls.

Klara dies under interrogation in an SS station for hiding and not revealing the whereabouts of Miriam, the resistance fighter she sheltered in her apartment for just a few hours. Miriam, in turn, dies while attempting to liberate Klara from the grip of the SS. By the end of the play, it is apparent that the good and heroic nature of the German tradition is at its best in both Klara and Miriam, who would rather lose their lives than be party to the Nazi regime. A transcendent heroism is equally alive in both, who are ready to love one of their “enemies” and lose their lives rather than be party to merciless killing.

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Truly Yours,
Robert Williams Writer/Director