Anka Nachtigal survived years in hiding in Kraków and the horrors of Auschwitz. More than 80 years later, her story is being told without a single spoken word.
Nachtigal, a world premiere by Ballet RI Resident Choreographer Yury Yanowsky, draws on the life of Anka Nachtigal, mother of Rhode Island resident Lilliane Birch. Created in partnership with the Sandra Bornstein Holocaust Education Center, the work opened the company’s 49th season in Providence in October. The show arrives at Westerly’s United Theatre on Friday, November 6, as part of In Motion, a three-work program from Ballet RI.
For much of the war, Nachtigal moved between hiding places in Kraków. She was eventually deported to Auschwitz, where Dr. Josef Mengele subjected her to his notorious experiments. The family’s history also involves Anka’s husband, John, whose path brought him from the Polish Army to Soviet capture, a Siberian labor camp, and a parachute jump back into occupied Poland. Birch wants audiences to know her mother as more than what she survived. “She was able to build a whole new life with my father in America after living in Poland, France, Canada, and the US, all in the space of six years,” says Birch. “She was a loving and giving mother to me and gave me the opportunity to spread my wings.”
Ballet holds a special place for Birch, who fell in love with the art form when her parents took her to see the Bolshoi Ballet as a child. “It is incredibly wonderful for me that what happened to them will be remembered through ballet,” Birch notes. “They were sad at the end of their lives to think that what happened to them would be forgotten in the future.” Birch later shared her family’s history directly with Yanowsky. “Yury was an attentive listener. He took it all in and afterward gave me a big hug.” For Yanowsky, honoring the family came first. “We are dealing with real people and real experiences, and I never wanted to use the horror of the Holocaust simply to create something dramatic,” reflects Yanowsky. “The challenge was to acknowledge the darkness without allowing it to become the only thing we see.”
The title carries a second meaning: Nachtigal is German for nightingale. “The nightingale is a small, almost fragile creature, but its song can be heard in the darkness,” Yanowsky shares. For him, the bird became a symbol of “beauty, hope and humanity continuing to exist even in circumstances designed to extinguish them.” Providence’s Holocaust Education Center kept that vision anchored in fact. “As artists, we can respond emotionally and imaginatively to a story, but when you are creating work connected to the Holocaust, imagination has to be grounded in history,” adds Yanowsky. “These are individual lives, families, choices, acts of cruelty, and acts of courage.”
Nachtigal shares the stage with two very different works. Yanowsky’s Bathers draws on paintings at the Westerly Museum of American Impressionism, turning their light and passing moments into dance. The evening also features the company premiere of City of Women by James Whiteside, a principal dancer with American Ballet Theatre and former Boston Ballet principal.
Above all, Yanowsky hopes viewers leave thinking about the power of individual choices. “Sometimes an act that seems very small can have consequences we could never imagine. Memory is not passive. We remember these stories not simply to look backward, but because they ask something of us in the present: How do we treat one another?
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