The Father, the Pogroms and the Parallel

A performance about how quickly - and seemingly painlessly - language use and mentality can shift in a society, and how the unthinkable suddenly appears entirely natural. A performance about the Holocaust in Romania and Sweden today.

In 1923, democracy's prospects in Romania looked fairly bright - all people, including Jews, Roma, and other minorities, were guaranteed equal rights. Twenty years later, genocide was a reality, with some of the world's most brutal pogroms, particularly against Jews, featuring concentration camps, death marches, and violence so extreme that Hitler urged Romanians to carry out the killings more neatly.

The performance begins with actress Adriana Savin's search for her father's life and survival as a Jew in Bucharest during World War II. It is also based on writer Mihail Sebastian's diaries from 1935-44 - the period when Romania embraced Nazism as ideology - and on observations of anti-democratic tendencies in our own time. Together they explore how easily prejudice can transform into genocide, what it is like to be a child or grandchild of a generation that survived war and persecution but refuses to speak of it, and how a person can love their own children yet kill another's.

Participants: Adriana Savin, Henrik Dahl, Peter Perski, Gaianeh Pilossian. Concept and text: Adriana Savin (text with Henrik Dahl). Direction: Henrik Dahl. Dramaturgy: Vesna Stanišić. Music: Dror Feiler. Movement direction: Andromachi D. Lindahl. Set design: Magnus Lindberg. Costumes: Ulrika van Gelder. Lighting: Jonatan Winbo. Make-up: Cais-Mari Björnlod. Producer: Hanna Melanton Appelfeldt. Produced by Teater Tribunalen.