Youth Fall Camp 2026

A 5-week intensive workshop series which will end in a performance to the public. This series will combine rehearsing with intense acting coaching and skill development, meeting three times a week.

Over 15,000 Jewish children passed through Terezin, and only about a hundred were still alive when Terezin was liberated at the end of the war. Friedl Dicker-Brandeis, a Bauhaus artist, taught secret art classes and collected her children’s drawings — 4,000 of them. One of her students put them in two suitcases, along with many poems. The art teacher didn’t survive, but the drawings and poems did. They were lost for a time, then discovered 10 years after the war. The play unfolds from the real-life Raja Englanderova’s point of view. We see her life at home, in vivid scenes with her father, mother, and brother Pavel. Then, she’s taken with her family to Terezín. Raja watches the trains come and the people she loves vanish. Most of her family first. Then she falls in love with a lad named Honza. He’s taken too, along with the art teacher, her brother Pavel, his wife of one hour: Irca, and the Rabbi who married them.
But Raja survives.In the play, Raja’s character is a survivor without a trace of survivor’s guilt. She’s driven by the responsibility of memory. The Nazis wanted to erase the inmates of Terezín. She’s determined to make them fail. The people of Terezín are people, not victims. They care about art, poetry, love and family. Despite the oppression, they live their day-to-day human lives.
That’s what Raja wants us to remember.