Wolfgang Barth [EURODRAM] conducted the interview with author Hadar Galron and translator Matthias Naumann on Saturday, 14 June 2025, at the DramatikerInnenfestival in Graz.
English version / original transcript
The questions were asked in German and English. Matthias translated the questions asked in German into Hebrew. Hadar then answered in English or Hebrew, and Matthias translated where necessary. In this version, you will find the original English parts and the German parts translated into English by Wolfgang Barth.
[Proofreading of the English version: Frank Wenzel.]
[Deutsche Version]
W. B.: Dear Hadar, dear Matthias,
First of all, a brief description of the situation. Yesterday [13 June 2025, W.B.] Israel attacked Iran, and Iran immediately responded with attacks on Israel. The airspace over Israel was closed. You don’t know how and when you can return home. How are you doing? Can you give an interview under these circumstances?
H. G.: Well, it’s something between being a VIP and a refugee. I know the feeling, unfortunately, already because I’ve been stuck in Slovakia since October 7, and it’s scary. Especially when my kids are not with me. I think, that’s the thing that has been affected the most in my personal state fromthe October 7 until now because we haven’t been in any stable situation since then. It’s my motherhood.
W. B.: Now I’d like to go straight to the play, if that’s all right, and ask some questions about it [Whistle by Hadar Galron, EURODRAM selection 2025]. There is whistling in the play. Sometimes there isn’t any whistling. When is there whistling and when not?
H. G.: Well, the whistle is very symbolic. When we hear a whistle, it reminds us maybe of the teapot that is on stage, and it reminds us of the whistling of trains. There are a lot of connotations, but in the play, the whistling is this inner place of the character, the lead character Tami. It’s her place of freedom. It’s the place where she allows herself to do what she’s not allowed to do at home. But then we understand that, two years before the time the play begins, she lost her whistle. She lost the ability to whistle, and she wants it back. So it’s a metaphorical situation. She needs to go through all the ghosts in order to ask for permission to love and to be loved so that she can love herself and whistle again. Only at the end, the very end of the play, does she actually really whistle.
W. B.: Thank you. Now, a detailed question: The play is deliberately constructed, perfectly built with images, with colours, with diverse literary references. I have a question about the colour: What does the colour yellow mean in particular? When does yellow appear? If the question is not too specific, I will have another colour question afterwards.
H. G.: Yes, the yellow and the black are the star, the Jewish star. Actually, it was the idea of the director to have me as the canvas, and not to have a canvas on stage because we were speaking about that all the time: The character is a painter, and will there be a canvas? Will the audience see the canvas? Can the audience see the canvas? And then one day, Hanna Vazana Grunwald – the director – she called me and said, „Hadar, I’ve got it, there’s no canvas, you are the canvas.“ And from the moment that, first of all, we knew that we had the play, […] I said, “So it needs to be yellow and black”, and then, whenever the colour is on me, it’s clear that we are painting the invisible rooms because these are rooms that are not really visible, the second generation rooms, and that we are using the same colours: the yellow and the black that we know so well from the Shoah. It’s very, very explicit to say these are the rooms that maybe are invisible in daily life, but on stage, we can make them visible.
W. B.: Okay. And is there a special meaning of the black moustache when, at the end, almost in that lucky moment when Tami meets the Maroccan guy, she paints herself a black moustache?
H. G.: Yes. First of all, this play was written with Jacob Buchan from his life story. I took some parts from his books and I also sat and spoke with him for a year, we met once a week. And there was a story with his daughter. His mother, who was actually Mengele’s secretary, came to their home, and she was very worried that his daughter looked too thin, and she was worried about it: “… but you’ll be like a Mussulman.” And Jacob Buchan, in one second of a kind of childlike impulse or something like… intuitively, without thinking, he took his daughter to the room, took his white makeup, made her a moustache, and said to his mother: “Look at her, she’s not a Mussulman, now, are you afraid for her?” … like… and with… like, just when he told me the story, I said: “This moment of half-craziness, of painting the moustache with the makeup on the face, must be … I must find a place for it. And I found a place at the end because that’s when she herself is dealing with the question „Am I a murderer?“ and as Amos Oz said in one of his books, the Shoah is not a “hit [on] the soul, it’s more like a poison of a snake, it goes into the victim, so we also get some of this poison of our… perpetrated in us.
W. B.: Yes. You spoke about Jacob Buchan, and that makes me ask a special question: In one scene that made a big impression on me, immediately after the liberation from the concentration camp, several young women, friends, and among them the mother, run as fast as they can through the street and into a house. There is still a meal on the table, and three of the women pounce on it and start eating immediately. But the mother sees a bunch of flowers and immediately sticks her head into the bouquet to smell the flowers intensely. Is this scene an original scene by Jacob Buchan, or did you make it up?
H. G.: So first, I will say that the ending was different in the beginning, and only in 2020 – the play went on stage 2019 – only in 2020, I suddenly heard Jacob telling this story. I’d never heard him tell the story before, and I said to him, how could you not have told me the story? He said to me that he thinks he was so full of anger and so full of the bad things that he wanted to say, that only now that they are on stage, he can… he has the memory of some of the good parts, and it kind of made way for the good parts, and I said: „I’m going to change the ending.“ This must be the story at the end, and so it’s… first of all, all the stories of the past, all of them, the chick and the father who finds his daughter… in the original it was the father who finds his wife, but because I’m playing the daughter, I changed it to the daughter. But all the stories of the past are autobiographical.
W. B.: Okay. Now it gets a bit complicated. There is… life and death… there is the Shoah and there is the attempt to free oneself from the Shoah and to live happily. The mother herself decides in favour of life by putting her face in the bouquet of flowers. Why doesn’t she manage to stick to this attitude later, why is she so opposed to her daughter – even though she has decided in favour of life?
H. G.: So, this is also a very good question. I was dealing a lot with it when I was with Jacob because I’d read many things about Mengele’s victims, and there was one victim – I don’t remember her name right now, but I’ll send it to you; I think it was Eva – she was disconnected from the survivors of the Holocaust because she forgave Mengele in order to live. And in the beginning, I wanted this kind of process to reach to the end of the play, where the daughter realizes she has to forgive her mother and has to forgive Mengele in order to love. And I even wrote a draft, and I sent it to Jacob, and I didn’t get a response, and then I met him, and I said to him: “What about this ending?” And he was silent. He said to me: “If you think it’s good, then do It.” And I said to him: „But you don’t think it’s good.“ He said, “My mother would never forgive Mengele”. And I said: „Would you forgive Mengele?“ and he was silent, and I said to him: „Look, I’m changing it. It needs to be something that you feel, but you can live with too.“ And that’s why the ending was changed, but I think that, when you see the ending on stage, you realize that there is a kind of reconciliation between the mother and the daughter, there is something that she is freed from, and she’s letting her go.
W. B.: Yesterday, we already talked about a passage in which the mother speaks of „us“; she says „we“, and she speaks of the „others“. The others are „none of us“. It’s about the Moroccan, for example, and the mother says: „He’s not one of us, he’s dirt“. How did this come about?
H. G.: Okay. So, first of all, this is how the holocaust survivors in Israel, and even now, they see that there are people from here, there are those that, there are „ours“ and those that are not „ours“, not „one of us“. And even within the holocaust survivals, there are both, those who were in camps and those who were not in camps, and it’s really, there is really a kind of… like a class, which class you belong to; whether you’re from the Auschwitz class or your just from the „saved in a cellar“ class, or you’re just from… that’s one thing you know, outside… I, myself, was very shocked with the inner racism, because I was born in London to a British mother and a Moroccan father. And in London, in England, there are Jews and Non-Jews, but from the moment I came to Israel, it was a big issue: “Okay, so what, which group do you belong to, what prayer do you pray?” […] And this is something my father tried to hide from us, even with the fact that he’s Moroccan. And I had just come to a city, so what, what I did, for the people, what I’ve done, what ethnic group do we belong to, and he said: “There are no more, there are no more ethnic groups, we’re like everyone, all Israeli are brothers, one to the other.” And I realized we’re on the wrong side because the ethnic group goes by the father and this is something that’s very, very rooted in Israeli society. So, yes, it immediately… and I know that my mother’s family were not pleased she’s married a Moroccan. It was in my family too. Maybe they were right.
W. B.: But was he Jewish?
H. G.: Yes. It doesn’t … we didn’t speak about it, even within the Jews; you know… every town needs a downtown, so…
W. B.: One more question about the play concerning hunger. „If you want to live, you must eat“ – the mother says this, she knows this. At the same time, she decided not to eat but to put her head into the flowers, and now she says to the daughter: „Your chick must live, your chick must eat“. The result of this in the end is that the chick dies. So hunger can kill. With hunger, you can reach lot of things. The main person feels guilty for having killed the chick. So I thought about hunger. First question: How can we understand this in the play?
H. G.: Understand what? Understand hunger?
M. N.: The role of hunger.
W. B.: Yes, the role of hunger. Because she wants…
H. G.: I think the role of food. I think it’s more than the role of hunger; it’s the role of food. Because as food, a lack of food can kill, overeating can kill. We all know that after the Shoah, some people who survived the camps ate a lot, and then they died. And we all know that there are, of course, people who died of hunger. And the daughter is doing, … Tami is doing to the chick what her mother does to her, but there, she’s so petrified that she’s pushing the face of the chick into the seed and into the water, and then that’s how she becomes a murderer in here own eyes. And so, and then… when her mother tells her “You must eat”, so, she doesn’t eat because I… “Oh my God, how can I eat now after what I did?“ And I think that only people who have born true hunger, real hunger, can understand what it means. We now hear the stories from the captives who came back from Gaza, speaking about hunger, speaking about having a quarter of a pita bread to share between four or five people, and how… how, in one way, it could elevate their spirituality and make them better people, and in another way, it was going through this terrible hunger. So, food is always a big issue for Holocaust survivors. I have a friend whose mother was second generation, and her mother did not let her eat the fresh bread, only the bread with the mould, only the bread that was going old. She would buy fresh bread – „No, you mustn’t touch this one; you must only have the old one with the green-and-white dots on.“
W. B.: So, I think, we can now leave the play and try to make a connection with what is going on in this very moment in our reality. There is hunger too. Is hunger used as a weapon?
H. G.: Yes. Hunger as a… food as survival, and when we speak about humanitarian aid, and when we speak about the captives in the hospitals in Gaza… In… in a big sense, I say that until October 7, I was doing this play in order to remind people about what happened in the past, but now I don’t think I’m doing the play to remind people of the past. I’m doing this play to remind people that there is a future that we need… we need to remember our future as well, and not only remember our past – in order to live a better life and… yes, when it comes to food and survival, and we see how cynical it is that 80% of the humanitarian aid that’s going in… is being confiscated by the leaders of their own people, it’s so… it’s so crazy that… I think that almost everything is really… today, when we eat, we are thinking of a hundred other people who cannot eat today… I, myself, I come from a religious home but… I’m not very religious today. I do believe in God; I’m not a religious person because religion brings a lot of problems with it. But, since October 7, I’ve gone back to…, very silently, to myself – but blessing everything I eat and drink, just saying thank you for it. So, this is my way of remembering that… we cannot take goodness for granted.
W. B.: Last question – not as heavy as the last one. Is there a movement in Israel where the second generation and the ones that follow aren’t dealing with the Shoah anymore? I have this impression because I read a comic by Jérémy Drès, a French Jewish graphic novelist, who wrote We won’t see Auschwitz. He wants to know where his grandparents came from, and as he knows that they lived in Poland, he goes there, looking for his roots. And he says: “But we will not visit Auschwitz” – „On n’ira pas voir Auschwitz“ in French. He doesn’t want to deny what has happened but, like Tami in the play, he wants to have his own life too. He wants to live and to look for a way to do this without always having the past in his head. Is this a general movement?
H. G.: Yes. I think in my play – first of all, when I was writing, you know that Jacob Buchan came to me, he was the one that initiated the play, and he wanted to tell the world what it is to be second generation, and what… and all the bad things that have happened, but I realized that in this generation now, if I want to tell people about the Shoah, nobody is going to listen any more – we can’t listen to this anymore. I said this: “I need to change between… what he wants and what is blocking her. I said, the Shoah and what… the second generation. We won’t need to be blocking her and not be what he wants to say. As a creator, I want to say something, but as the character I’m using this to block what I really want. The character wants to live. Also, I changed between the ratzon and mazon, and that was how I found the dramatic key to tell the story. If there is a movement in Israel? Not big enough yet because every time something happens, we have this, you know, DNA memory. We can’t not think of the Shoah, when on October 7, also it wasn’t the least proportions at all. It’s difficult to get out of it, there is… you know, there are two commandments from the Torah to the Jewish nation about what the enemy does, the one is: [Citation in Hebrew:] „Remember what Amalek (עֲמָלֵק) – Hitler is considered descendant of Amalek – did to you“. And the other is: [Citation in Hebrew:] „To erase even the memory of Amalek“. So, it sounds like a contradiction: How can you „remember what they did to you“, and, on the other hand, „wipe out the memory“. So I think there… this is the fine line that we need to walk on; on the one hand not forgetting but on the other hand erasing the wounds; stop living on these wounds. Stop nurturing the wounds and focus on healing, and healing, I’m looking forward and remembering the future. That’s the… that’s the tension between these two things.
I want to add one thing. A lot of times, I’m asked if this is like my mother, if my mother was like this, and I always say, I’m not second generation, and my mother was far, so far from the mother in the play, and in fact, she’s the one that translated the play to English; she made the English translation. So, I want it to be very clear, that my mother, who passed away just a few weeks ago, was the woman who introduced me to theatre. Even though she was religious, she was the one who… she was my first playwright, and my first director, and my first audience, and my first fan. So, this is for my mother.
W. B.: You love your mother very much.
H. G.: Yes, yes.
W. B.: I have no more questions. Do you want to say anything else?
M. N.: No, I think that’s a good ending to the interview.
W. B.: So I thank you very much for this interview.
M. N.: Thank you.
H. G.: Thank you, thank you. [in German]