The Brown & White

The lights dim in Baker Hall as Madame F gingerly walks to the podium. The atmosphere is solemn and silent. The lighting and piano silhouette set the tone for the Tuesday night performance commemorating the Holocaust.

Students, faculty and community members attended Claudia Stevens' performance, "An Evening with Madame F." The Philip and Muriel Berman Center for Jewish Studies sponsored the event in remembrance of the 70th anniversary of Kristallnacht.

Kristallnacht was a Nazi pogrom that occurred throughout the night of Nov. 9, 1938. On this single night, Nazis burned and raided thousands of Jewish houses in Germany and its occupied lands, destroying 200 synagogues, killing at least 91 Jewish people and deporting 25,000 to concentration camps in the process.

In her one-woman show, Stevens portrays Madame F, a fictional Jewish woman saved from the Auschwitz concentration camp barracks to play in the orchestra for the Nazis at the concentration camp.

The performance is set 20 years ago, in an auditorium somewhere in the United States. Stevens plays an older woman speaking on tour to promote her new book about surviving a concentration camp.

Through monologue and music, which was played and sung by women inmates during the Holocaust, Stevens tells the story of Madame F's experience.

"I used my art for gain, while others were annihilated without pity," Madame F said.

Stevens, the daughter of Holocaust survivors, obtained a master's in musicology at the University of California at Berkeley and a doctoral degree in musical arts at Boston University. She has also written several contemporary solo plays and has been featured on National Public Radio as a musician. Over the past 20 years she has performed "An Evening with Madame F" in more than 100 communities.

After the performance, Stevens said orchestras were common in concentration camps "to create this veneer of normalcy."

In a question and answer session, Stevens said she drew upon Fania Fenelon's book Sursis Pour L'Orchestre for factual data. Fanelon played in the orchestra at Auschwitz for the Schutzstaffel, an elite military unit that served as Hitler's bodyguard. Her book is a memoir describing how music healed her and provided her with hope during the Holocaust.

Stevens said she also based Madame F on other survivors she has met.

Stevens said that often the question arises as to whether her character was traitorous by using music to survive.

"By prostituting her art to survive, did she somehow sacrifice her soul?" Stevens asked.

Taylor Kite,'12, said she attended the performance because she watched a movie about a woman playing music in a concentration camp for class.

"I did personally like [the performance]," Kite said. "It was interesting for me to come full-circle."