My Grandmother’s Shoes Transported Me to the Streets of Europe
For seven weeks, I inhabited the shoes and the role of Helga in ‘The Kindertransport.’
My grandma never threw anything out. I have a copper-colored beaded dress with puffy lace sleeves hanging in an unused closet. I also have a pair of her shoes. They are black suede with a chunky heel, an open toe, and laces up the front. Very 1930’s. When I landed a part with the Elmwood Playhouse, in 1999, I thought of my grandmother’s shoes.
I had just sent my oldest daughter off to college two months before the auditions. In order to help me stop crying, it’s an empty-nest thing, I needed to engage in something creative. I spoke to Hollie, the culprit of my empty-nest syndrome, about my longing to, once again, do theater.
“You should try out, Ma,” she said from her Wesleyan dorm room.
“What about Daddy? He’d hate my being gone for all that time,” I said.
There would be three months of rehearsals and six week-ends of shows. It was easy for her to say. She wouldn’t have to deal with her dad’s pouty face. But with Hollie’s encouragement, I took a deep breath, squared my shoulders and boldly announced my intentions at dinner one night. “I am thinking about auditioning for a play,” I said. Okay. Maybe not so boldly.
My husband was not happy.
“Who is going to make dinner?” he asked.
“I will. All you have to do is heat it up in the microwave.”
“What about the kids?” he asked.
“You mean your 16-year-old daughter and 14-year-old son? They will survive. They will be here to help you through the trial of dinner and the clean up afterwards. That means an empty sink and drainboard…and no crumbs on the table.”
I played the part of Helga in the play Kindertransport. She was a fortyish, German-Jewish woman who was desperate to save her child from the cruelty of the Nazis. Helga decided to put her eight-year-old daughter on The Kindertransport, a train that transplanted children from Germany, Austria, and other Nazi occupied countries, to England before the borders closed.
I had not heard of these trains before doing this play but my gap in education was quickly remedied. In the course of learning my part, the director and I interviewed a former ‘kinder’ who lived in Rockland County, where we were performing the play. The whole experience was emotionally overwhelming. After surviving the camps, my character went back to England in search of her fifteen-year-old daughter. Once found, the child no longer wanted to return to her biological mother. Helga had lost her daughter after all.
As I walked on stage wearing those 1930’s black, suede heels, I felt transported to the streets of Europe. For the one week of dress rehearsals and the six weeks of performance, I wore those shoes. After one of the performances, a week before the end of the run, my ankle buckled and I fell. Panic engulfed me. How could I be the one actress to take literally the quip Break a Leg?
Those shoes. They were not meant for walking, after sixty years in a box. But I wanted authenticity, so on my feet they rested. After a weekend of foot elevation, I was ready to complete the remainder of the performances. Those shoes destroyed my ankle but I still cannot get rid of them.
For three months, I came home to a spotless kitchen and my kids didn’t end up in ‘Juvie.’ That is when the realization hit me: I could survive a child growing up and leaving home. I could survive a pouting husband. After all, my child would return to me. Our family would survive.
