Shakespeare in a Nazi prison camp and the ten-year-old little girl who kept the album

In the winter of 1944, two Jews were hiding in plain sight inside a Nazi prisoner of war camp in northern Germany.

One was directing Shakespeare for the Germans.

The other was ten years old.

One was a celebrated French actor named Marco Béhar.

The other was a Polish girl named Edna, living under a false name and a false religion.

She was a real soldier. She had earned her medal.

What she was hiding was that her name was not Stefcia Skolkowska.

And that she was Jewish.

Two Jews hiding in plain sight inside a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Two Jews hiding in plain sight inside a Nazi prisoner of war camp.

Marco Béhar’s secret was kept by almost no one.

According to the son of Sylvain Masson, a member of L’Équipe, the camp’s French prisoner theater troupe, only a recording employee and one high-ranking German official responsible for overseeing POW theater troupes and orchestras knew that their director was Jewish.

How the German official came to know, and why he apparently said nothing, belongs to the long list of wartime mysteries that died with the people who lived them.

What we know is this.

Béhar directed Hamlet inside Stalag X-B.

The Germans approved it. They stamped the photographs geprüft.

They had no idea, or someone with authority had decided not to care, that the man running their cultural program was precisely the kind of person the Reich was trying to exterminate.

A Jewish director staging Hamlet for the Nazis.

A Jewish director staging Hamlet for the Nazis.

After the war Béhar returned to France, resumed his........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)