Μέρα Σάββατο (On a Saturday)

On a Saturday, March 25th 1944, a German Wehrmacht commando organized the deportation of almost 2,000 jews from Ioannina to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Practically the entire Romaniote Jewish community – the oldest Jewish one in Europe that had found a safe haven in the capitol city of the region of Epirus in northwestern Greece 2,000 years previously – was extinguished. That this was a Sabbath and simultaneously a Greek holiday belonged to the Nazis’ tactics of collective humiliation.

For the French theater maker Irène Bonnaud and Greek actress and singer Fotini Banou, one question is the focus of their second cooperation: how can the testimony of Shoah survivors remain alive when those who can give first-hand accounts of atrocities are no longer alive? While at the same time a relativization, denial and instrumentalization of the crimes have been poisoning the public and political discourse in Europe and beyond.

The text and music collage of ΜΕΡΑ ΣΑΒΒΑΤΟ (ES WAR AN EINEM SAMSTAG) tells a little-known chapter of the annihilation of European Judaism by interweaving records by the important Greek author Dimitris Hadzis, interviews with the few survivors as well as Jewish-Greek and Jewish-Spanish songs.

With tenderness and tenacity, this extraordinary evening tells of mourning for a vanished world, but also of resistance. Theater becomes the guardian of memory.