In the swill of my knowledge about Nazi Germany’s depravity I hadn’t known, or remembered, that the policy of furthering the master race – a phrase which is impossible to think of without chuckling ever since Mel Brooks lampooned it in The Producers – included Himmler’s Lebensborn programme which involved stealing “racially pure” children from middle and east European countries under German occupation and installing them with German families.
In this new play based on interviews with the investigative journalist Gitta Sereny and written by the Jewish former artistic director of The Young Vic, David Lan, Juliet Stevenson plays Ruth, who once worked for UNRRA (the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, not to be confused with UNRWA). Her post-war job was to help repatriate displaced or orphaned children, and it was while doing this work that she discovered the programme that involved German doctors measuring the noses, heads and other parts of the anatomy of children to discern whether the are “special” or not.
We first encounter Ruth in 1990 in her London flat which has just been stormed by a flustered Thomas (Tom Wlaschiha), who we learn fell under the protection of Ruth as a boy when she discovered him living in a German village. Today Thomas is a renowned concert pianist, a career that Ruth lovingly follows, though she hasn’t seen him for years.
Driven by the sense that a great wrong has informed his life without ever quite understanding what it is, he has arrived hot foot from his latest performance in New York in search of answers.
