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On Tuesdays the train leaves.
But no matter where You place me, I will always long for this desk.

Portrait photograph of Etty Hillesum. So begins the play set shortly before Etty is deported to Auschwitz where she is killed. Caught in the Nazi's complex game with human lives, Etty faces an ethical dilemma as a worker on Amsterdam's Jewish Council where she struggles between her instinct to live and her willingness to die. She refuses to see herself as a victim and chooses to accept her fate and suffer with her fellow Jews.

Sharing the stage with a suitcase, Etty speaks to us as she tries to gain clarity and insight into her life as she prepares for her three day journey to the east.

Music from Westerbork's Cabaret is woven into sharp accounts of the transports, the fields of lupins, the barbed wire, and the untenable situation of Jews in the Jewish Council. Etty's story is a struggle against despair. She tries to engage the horror rather than shrink from it, embracing everything about it. By confronting the truth of what is happening she creates a new form of resistance that poses a larger question and ultimately liberates her.

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Modified: 2009 Jan 09