Miami Student

Issue date: 4/17/07 Section: Campus

Emily Layman performs a monologue at Leonard Theater in Peabody Hall Monday night. The presentation included interviews with Jewish students.

The lights were dim and the mood somber in Leonard Theater as the Walking Theater Project performed a short theatrical piece, drawing Miami University's first Holocaust Awareness and Remembrance Program to a close.

More than 150 students crowded into the theater Monday night, while Miami students performed an original piece especially created for the remembrance week.

The presentation juxtaposed a collection of video interviews with Miami students and faculty, alongside footage and photographs of World War II Nazi concentration camps. The presentation also featured dramatic monologues showcasing the lives of modern day Jewish students.

"All the generations (of Jewish people) after the Holocaust were essentially baptized by it," said Eric Greenberg, a Jewish Miami student whose interview was featured in the production. "I'm constantly thinking about it."

At the end of the performance, actors walked out of the theater holding candles to symbolize the six million Jews, as well as the five million other victims, killed during the Holocaust. Looking into the audience, they spoke simply saying, "You are the hope."

The Walking Theater Project is a group of about 25 Miami students, created to be a student-run social activist theater group on campus.

Working in collaboration with other student groups, the company sought to respectfully portray the events of the Holocaust by first interviewing many Jewish Miami students.

"Through reflection, thought and storytelling, I am able to create a 'living memory' for the Jewish students of Miami that I interviewed," said Beth Stelling, an actor in the Walking Theater Project.

The evening performance came after a lecture earlier in the day by architecture and interior design professor Gerardo Brown-Manrique titled, "Lives Lost, Lives Saved: Victor Fürth, Rudolf Fränkel, Their Families, and Their Clients, in Interwar and Wartime Europe."

Evoking emotions, Brown-Manrique discussed the lives of the two architects who were caught up in the Holocaust. Both Fürth and Fränkel eventually became Miami professors in 1949 and 1950.

Taking place in 001 Alumni Hall, the lecture was attended by about 25 students, faculty and community members.

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