BY MICHELLE C
Some elements of the human spirit cannot be subdued. Holocaust survivor Nava Shean’s dedication to acting, in the face of great peril, is a testament to just such strength and passion.
A girl of nine plays the part of a Japanese boy bravely facing execution in a theater show in Prague. At eighteen, she has a promising career in Prague’s Children Theater.
The German invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1938 bans her from acting on the stage, so she acts behind the stage, reciting the dialogue in a puppet show. Deported to Terezin concentration camp, she organizes a theater where inmates perform plays by Edmond Rostand, Rudyard Kipling, Jean Cocteau and Nikolai Gogol. The spectators pay for their tickets to the shows by food.
Throughout her life, Nava Shean remained true to her greatest passion: to be an actress, “even if I can only walk across the stage and wave a handkerchief.” Her love of acting sustained her spirit against internment, economic hardships, and intrigue and betrayal by colleagues.
To Be an Actress
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Nava Shean was born as Vlasta Schönová in Czechoslovakia in 1919. She survived the concentration camp and in 1948 immigrated to Israel, where she changed her nickname “Vava” into “Nava” and “Schön” into “Shean.”
While interned in the concentration camp, Shean performed with fellow actors, musicians, and directors. They rehearsed and performed at night, after a full day of menial labor. Shean also organized a children’s theater, where she adapted the Czech children’s story Broucci (fireflies). She describes how, years later at a reunion of Terezin survivors, a woman approached her, introduced herself as “a firefly,” and told Shean:
I owe you my childhood. My entire childhood was totally erased from my memory because of the trauma of the holocaust… When I was your ‘firefly,’ this became my best childhood memory: to run around the stage and sing ‘the Spring will come.’ It was for me more than you can imagine. You created there, under the difficult conditions, great moments for the children.
Shean’s single-minded concentration on acting enabled her to transcend the ugliness and misery around her. She describes how while in Terezin, she has to work at a hospital ward of elderly women. Shean watches one woman and thinks:
I will perform this on the stage if I ever have such a role. I must register all the small details in my memory. How she is moving her hands, never lies still. Vava, you are disgusting. Rather than feel some human compassion you think about the theater? You are not human. Yes, I am disgusted with myself. I am a true actress.
After the liberation, Shean returned to the Czech stage and served as the manager of a new theater in the town of Brno. In 1948 she escaped Czechoslovakia’s looming Communist takeover, seizing an opportunity to immigrate to Israel. In Israel she overcame the language barrier and eventually performed Shakespearean roles such as King Lear’s Goneril.
As a young single mother, Shean resisted the arguments that her child’s welfare required that she relinquishes acting. Having no relatives in her new country, she found an older couple who served as adoptive parents for her and her baby daughter. Her acting continued uninterrupted.
In 1968, during the Prague Spring, Shean visited Czechoslovakia for the first time since leaving twenty years earlier. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia cut short her visit and she had to escape Communism once again.
But during that visit, she resumed a relationship cut short by World War II with Hubert Hermann, who had saved her sister during the war. Hermann joined her in Israel after eight years of fighting Communist bureaucracy. Excerpts from his letters to Shean during those years provide a glance into life under Communism and an insight into Hermann’s resistance to its stifling impact through wry humor. (“I only need to add up 65 monthly salaries to buy a Škoda!”)
The memoir, To Be an Actress, is not intellectual, but experiential. It does not preach an ideology, but shows Shean’s adherence to her convictions of dedication, hard work, and independence. There is no explicit criticism of the Kibbutz ideology, but Shean tells how she left the Kibbutz once the members voted against her continuing to act.
For her, there was never a choice between acting and economic security. She moved to the city and built her life and career on her own, supporting herself by traveling shows. In the end, Shean was an entrepreneur who established herself as a one-woman theater.
In fact, it would be wrong to say that Shean does not preach an ideology. She preaches the ideology of dedication to her greatest passion: to be an actress.
Translation note: Shean published two versions of her memoir. The Hebrew version was published in Israel in 1991, under the title Lehiyot Sachkanit, and the Czech version was published in the Czech Republic in 1993 under the title Chtěla jsem být herečkou. To Be an Actress is the translation of the Hebrew version.
Michelle Fram Cohen is a translator, interpreter, and language instructor and tester. She hold graduate degrees in Comparative Literature and History and is pursuing a PhD which combines the two fields. She lives in Maryland with her husband and son.