After spending a month cleaning toilets, Pauline Kalker's grandfather died in Auschwitz. His son, Pauline's father, survived the Second World War in the Netherlands, a Jewish child in hiding, separated from his family. In many ways, this history has shaped Kalker's life. But despite her career as a theatre artist, and her role in the acclaimed Dutch theatre collective Hotel Modern, it was a story that for years she felt she couldn't tell.
"Maybe it's a stupid thing, but because my mother's not Jewish, I never felt I was entitled to talk about this matter," Kalker, 41, said over coffee in Vancouver this week.
It took some soul searching, and many conversations with family members and other Holocaust survivors to convince Kalker that Hotel Modern had the ability - and permission - to tackle the subject. The result is KAMP, which has its North American premiere tonight as part of the PuSh International Performing Arts Festival and the Cultural Olympiad.
In KAMP, an enormous model of Auschwitz fills the stage, along with 3,500 tiny, handmade puppets, representing the prisoners. A giant screen projects live images of the puppets in motion, operated by Kalker and her Hotel Modern collaborators, Herman Helle (also her husband and Hotel Modern's model maker) and Arlene Hoornweg. They roam about the stage carrying cameras, like giant war correspondents amid the eight-centimetre high puppets.
"Showing the whole machinery using the model, we can give people a notion of the scale and the enormity of the mass murder," says Kalker. "So many people were there." It's estimated at least 1.1 million people died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp.
There are no characters, there is no text. Just bleak vignettes set against an eerie soundtrack - birds, the wheels of the carts that were used to transport bodies to the crematoria, all taped on-site by Kalker and Helle during a trip to Auschwitz several years ago when they started to conceive of the project.
The puppets were made by hand - satisfying work but also emotionally difficult. One represents her grandfather, Josef Emanuel Kalker, a doctor who made house calls in The Hague before the Nazis invaded the Netherlands. After the invasion, he tried to get his family on a boat to England, but they were denied access to the ship. Soon, he was arrested, tortured for three long days and nights, and sent to Auschwitz. He died a month later.
His two children - a boy (Pauline Kalker's father, Joost) and a girl - were sent from house to house, kept hidden until the war ended. His wife was jailed and escaped years later when the truck in which she was being transported was bombed. Hitchhiking, she was then picked up by a Nazi officer. Her perfect German and considerable nerve helped conceal the dangerous fact that she was Jewish.
Kalker isn't sure how her grandfather's story ended. Did he die in the gas chamber? Was he shot? There is no record of how he died. But she felt a need to tell what she could.
"I wanted to get close to my grandfather in a symbolic way, to be there in that place. ... to witness his death," she says.
In developing KAMP, Kalker interviewed her father, and other distant relatives who had survived concentration camps.She also met other Auschwitz survivors, and explained the concept of KAMP to them. "It was a very positive experience for me to meet these survivors and it was also for them because they were really happy that somebody from the younger generation was making this effort to tell their story in a way."
When KAMP opened in Rotterdam in 2005, Kalker's father and sister were in the audience. Watching them cry and hold hands, Kalker was struck that this was the closest thing they had had to a funeral for their father. It was an outlet for them to mourn.
Joost Kalker has since died. While Pauline Kalker believes he had mixed feelings about the project ("My father told me, 'Oh, you should be happy that you're not Jewish. You know it's not good to be Jewish in this world.'"), she believes she has a responsibility to tell this story.
"So many precious lives were taken and in the most horrific way to think of, an industrialized way. So in a way the audience gets a little bit of a notion of what humanity is capable of and also we give some attention to the people who died," she says.
KAMP runs at Vancouver's Roundhouse Community Arts Centre until Feb. 6.