THIN EDGE OF THE WEDGE Play Timeline
[The names of the characters who narrate in the play are in all caps.]
September 1, 1939: Nazi Germany attacks Poland, starting what will become World War II. Lithuanian Jewish child JUDITH explains that soon after the Nazis invaded western Poland, the Russians occupied Eastern Poland, where she lives.
June 1941: JUDITH is at a Russian Communist youth camp when the Nazis break their nonaggression pact with the Russians and invade Russian-occupied territory.
After personal history by PHYLLIS we turn back the clock to before the war –
November 9-10, 1938: The Nazis carry out a pogrom against Jews in Germany and the newly annexed Austria. German Jewish child ELFRIEDE MORGENSTERN describes her experience during what is called Kristallnacht or Reichspogromnacht. (A pogrom is an organized massacre of a particular ethnic group, in particular that of Jewish people in Russia or eastern Europe.)
Then we turn the clock back further –
March 1933: Nazi concentration camp Dachau (near Munich) opened less than two months after Hitler legally appointed chancellor of German and subsequently transformed Germany into a dictatorship.
September 1935: The Nazis pass two Nuremberg Laws. The Law for the Protection of German Blood and German Honor forbids marriages and extramarital sexual relations between Jews and Germans. The Reich Citizenship Law declares that only those of German or related blood are eligible to be German Reich citizens. The Jews are classed as state subjects without citizen rights. Then the following month these racial laws are extended to include the Romani and black people. This supplementary decree defines the Romani as “enemies of the race-based state” of Germany in the same category as Jews.
Summer Olympics of 1936: Held in Berlin – the U.S. and other major countries attend.
March 1938: Nazi Germany engineers the annexation of Austria into the Greater Germanic Reich.
September 30, 1938: The Munich Agreement gives in to Hitler’s demand for the Sudetenland region of Czechoslovakia; signed with Nazi Germany by the U.K., France, and Italy. Family of Czech Jewish teen SOL flees Prague for Romania.
March 1939: Nazi Germany swallows up the rest of Czechoslovakia with no military response from other countries.
Summer 1939: As war looms closer, Romanian-born RUTH KLUGER arrives in Europe from the land of Israel to try to help Romanian Jews to leave Romania.
September 3, 1939: Two days after Nazi Germany invades Poland, Poland’s allies Britain and France declare war on Nazi Germany.
June 14, 1940: Nazi Germany forces occupy Paris unopposed following the earlier evacuation of retreating Allied forces from the French port of Dunkirk to Great Britain and the June 10 entrance of Italy into the war on the side of the Nazis.
Summer 1940: Japanese consul general in Lithuania Chiune Sugihara and his wife Yukiko save thousands of Jews fleeing German-occupied Western Poland and Russia-occupied Eastern Poland and Lithuania by issuing transit visas for travel through Japanese territories.
Fall 1940: The Nazis “re-settle” 400,000 Polish Jews into the Warsaw Ghetto.
April 1941: ELFRIEDE MORGENSTERN, her sister and mother gets visas to join their father in the U.S.
June 1941: When the Nazis break the nonaggression pact, SOL flees east from Romania.
Summer 1941: JUDITH, her mother, sister and brother are rounded up by the Nazis and carted to the ghetto of Shlabotka in Lithuania.
The Nazis’ Einsatzgruppen – mobile death squads – shoot thousands of Jews as the Nazis advance into Russian-occupied territory. These massacres later become known as the Holocaust by bullets in which “one third of all Jewish Holocaust victims died as a result of shooting actions” (citation from U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum).
September 1941: Massacre of Jews at Babi Yar, a ravine outside Kiev in the Ukraine.
December 7, 1941: The Japanese bomb the U.S. Navy base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. The U.S. declares war on Japan – and then Nazi Germany declares war on the U.S. The U.S. declares war on Nazi Germany.
January 20, 1942: Top Nazis meet in a villa in the Wannsee area of Berlin regarding plans for the Final Solution of the Jews – extermination of a planned 11 million Jews. This 11 million included the still unoccupied countries such as the U.K. that Nazi Germany still plans to occupy.
Summer 1942: Polish social worker IRENA SENDLER – head of the children’s section of Zegota, the Polish Council to Aid Jews – smuggles children out of the Warsaw Ghetto as the deportations to the extermination camp of Treblinka begin.
July 1942: Polish Jewish teen JACK PRICE is illegally outside the Warsaw Ghetto when the ghetto is surrounded in order to carry out the deportations. Jack cannot get back to his family in the ghetto and instead joins the Polish underground.
July 1942: French police in Paris round up Jewish men, women and children and hold them temporarily interned for several days in a cycling stadium without food or water before deportation to their deaths in Auschwitz.
August 1942: The POLISH COUNTESS gets a stay-of-execution for some of the Jews working on her estate.
November 1942: The “stay-of-execution” for the Jews working on the estate of the POLISH COUNTESS expires as the Nazis roundup the Jews to be murdered.
End of 1942: JUDITH, her mother and sister are sent to Auschwitz extermination camp.
April 19, 1943 — eve of Passover: The remaining Jews start the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising and hold off the Nazis until May 16. Ghetto occupant Chaim Kaplan and his wife have already been deported to their deaths at Treblinka, although his diary record of life in the ghetto survives.
Fall 1943: Ordinary Danish citizens first hide and then smuggle to Sweden more than 7,200 of Denmark’s 8,000 Jews when the Danes are secretly warned that the Nazis plan to deport the Danish Jews to Germany.
Mid-October 1943: Although the Italians implement anti-Jewish racial laws starting in September 1938 (three years after the 1935 Nuremberg laws), the Jews in Rome are not rounded up until the Nazis have taken over control of Italian territory following the Italian military surrender to the Allies in early September 1943. The JEWISH CHLD IN ROME recounts the October day she escapes the roundup.
August 25, 1944: Paris is liberated. RUTH KLUGER goes to France to see what happened to the Jews in France.
Summer or early fall 1944: JUDITH, her mother and sister are transported from Auschwitz to another concentration camp – Stutthof – where Judith’s mother is taken to the gas chamber. (Info on gas chamber at Stutthof — https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/stutthof)
Winter 1944-45: The death marches from the concentration camps begin as the Nazis determine to get rid of the evidence of their mass murder in the death camps. JUDITH and her sister escape from a death march although they are far from being safe.
November 7, 1944: Hungarian-born Hannah Senesh is executed by a Nazi firing squad following her efforts to save Hungarian Jews. After immigration at the age of 18 from Hungary to the land of Israel, she had enlisted in 1943 in the British Army and trained as a paratrooper. Parachuting into Yugoslavia, she was caught and brought to Budapest for interrogation, torture and incarceration.
May 5, 1945: JUDITH is liberated three days before Victory in Europe Day. Thanks to the heroic military victory of the Allies, the Nazis have only murdered 6 million Jewish men, women and children out of the planned 11 million.
Years after the end of WWII and the Holocaust: American Jew FELICE and her Holocaust survivor mother visit Germany, where Felice finally has a glimpse of her mother’s unexplained Holocaust past.