Women’s war lives reimagined in new Smashing Times production

In 1942, a young woman from Dublin wrote a postcard in coded Hebrew and threw it from the window of a train taking her to her death.

The postcard said: ‘Uncle Lechem, we did not find, but we found Uncle Tisha B’av” – meaning ‘we did not find plenty, but we found destruction’.

Ettie Steinberg is the only Irish woman known to have died in Auschwitz during World War II. This week, Smashing Times Theatre Company will take her story, among others, and create monologues of their last days or pivotal moments in their lives for the stage.

Writer Deirdre Kinahan explains: “I think what struck me about Ettie was that she was a woman just down the South Circular Road.”

Director Mary Moynihan sits with Deirdre in the lush garden of the Lantern Centre where you can see St Kevin’s Church looming over the patio. They are here watching a rehearsal for ‘Ode to Ettie’.

If you turn right from the Lantern and walk towards the other end of Harrington Street, you find yourself at Raymond Street, where Ettie lived for more than 10 years and worked as a seamstress.

Roisin McAtamney plays Ettie, along with two other characters in ‘The Woman is Present’. As Ettie, McAtamney recounts imagined summers spent in Limerick on holidays, a passionate romance with a local Catholic boy and the anti-Semitic neighbour who invokes God’s name when she catches them kissing in her shed.

The Jewish community in Dublin is based in Dublin 8. It was at the Irish Jewish Museum across the canal where Deirdre researched Dublin’s Jewish community. She looked at their customs, and the dishes they ate like Gefilte fish and pot roast, to work that aspect into Ettie’s monologue.

“It’s interesting to think about how, in one way, their life was embedded in Irish culture,” she says. “In another, their life was alien and must have been exotic to those outside of it.”

The daughter of Czechoslovakian immigrants, Ettie married a Belgian man, Vogtjeck Gluck, in 1937, in the nearby Greenville Synagogue.

Her move to continental Europe would seal her fate. After fleeing to France from Belgium, Ettie, Vogtjeck and their son Leon were arrested by Nazis. She wrote her last words aged 28.

Ettie’s story is just one of six that inspired ‘The Woman is Present’. Apart from ‘Ode to Ettie’, all are written by Mary, Paul Kennedy and actress Fiona Baun Thompson who plays some of the lead roles.

“Our year-long project is called ‘Women, War and Peace’,” said Mary, who co-founded Smashing Times in 1991. “We wanted to use a creative process to promote the remembrance of women in European history and gender equality.”

‘The Woman is Present’ will show nightly at 7.30pm at the Samuel Beckett Theatre in Trinity College from September 14-16. Friday will feature a symposium with workshops and speakers such as Senator Ivana Bacik.

Tickets are free. Call 01-8656613 to reserve a seat.

Aura McMenamin