Kansas Citian endured 7 Nazi concentration camps. New play tells his story of survival
Eighty years after the Nazis seized 15-year-old Jack Mandelbaum and shipped him to a concentration camp, his story will come to life on a Kansas City area stage.
“Surviving Hitler,” Andrea Warren’s adaptation of her nonfiction book tracking Mandelbaum’s story, will run April 9-14 at the Jewish Community Center’s Lewis and Shirley White Theatre. Warren has written nine books for readers ages 10 and up, but this is her first play.
The Prairie Village author, whose “Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps” has sold nearly a million copies since being published in 2001, said the stage version is appropriate for older children as well as adults.
“It’s not an easy topic,” she said. “A third of it takes place in concentration camps. But what keeps people going with this story and has all of these years is they become so involved with Jack and with his family. This is a family story, too.”
Mandelbaum lived in Gdynia, Poland, before the Nazis bounced him from one concentration camp to another to another — seven in all — during World War II. His parents and two siblings died in the camps, along with almost all of Jack’s other relatives and 6 million other Jews.
“I had a sister, and I had a brother and my parents, and I’m the only one that survived,” he said. “… I desperately wanted to come back to our home. That’s what kept me going.”
After the Allies liberated the camps, Mandelbaum immigrated to the United States, settling in Kansas City. He raised a family and became a businessman and community activist.
Whenever he could, Mandelbaum spoke in area schools about the Holocaust. In 1993, he co-founded — with his friend and fellow Holocaust survivor Isak Federman — the Midwest Center for Holocaust Education, which is housed at the Jewish Community Center in Overland Park. The Holocaust center and several donors are underwriting the production of Warren’s new play.
Mandelbaum, who has lived in Naples, Florida, for the past 12 years, will turn 95 on April 10, and the hope was that he would attend “Surviving Hitler” that evening. Although health issues will prevent the trip, Mandelbaum remains willing and able to discuss his past — even displaying a bit of dark humor about the horror he endured.
“The reason I got so deeply involved in the Holocaust education was I had a neighbor of mine who asked me what kind of sports we played in the concentration camps. I said, ‘They were trying to kill us. We were trying to stay alive.’”
That simple determination to survive is at the core of both the play and the book. Warren peeled away the layers of Mandelbaum’s experiences more than two decades ago when she interviewed him once a week for two hours over four months.
“That literally, emotionally, was all he could handle,” Warren said. “… For him it always meant one night, and usually two nights, of nightmares because of the material that was coming to the surface.
“He took me right into those camps. I could see it. I could literally smell it, the way he described it.”
The idea of turning the book into a play had bounced around for years, but Warren was always busy with other projects. Then in 2019, after completing her most recent book, “Enemy Child: The Story of Norman Mineta, A Boy Imprisoned in a Japanese American Internment Camp During World War II,” she was on the verge of retiring.
But Keith Wiedenkeller, the arts and culture director at the Jewish Community Center, rekindled the idea of a stage play, and she couldn’t resist.
“Keith said, ‘I think it’s time. Let’s give it a try,’” Warren said. “The thing is we weren’t talking about me giving it a try.”
After souring on the idea of bringing in an outsider to convert the book into a script for the stage, she decided to take it on herself.
“It’s like, all right, exactly how hard can this be, having never done it?” she said. “Well, it turns out it’s very hard. It was just a whole new set of skills. There was a lot of trial and error.”
Tim Bair, artistic director of Johnson County’s Theatre in the Park, will direct “Surviving Hitler.” He worked with Warren over the past year to bring the script to life.
“It’s pretty intense, honestly,” Bair said. “It’s a huge responsibility. … It’s extraordinary, honestly, the entire tale of it all. And his survival.”
The cast of 22 local actors includes three who will portray Mandelbaum at different points of his life, with Kevin Fewell as older Jack narrating. “It flashes back and forth between him telling the story and the actors acting the story,” Bair said.
Brayden Christiansen plays Jack at ages 12 to 15 in Poland. Ben Renfrow plays Jack at 15 to 18 in the concentration camps and after liberation.
Mandelbaum hopes the play helps educate children and adults alike about the Holocaust without evoking pity. He said that was how he approached his talks in area classrooms.
“My theme was that I didn’t want people to feel sorry for me,” he said. “I wanted young students to know what they have, how precious it is to have parents, to have a home, to have a school and so on. That was my theme. Not for somebody to feel sorry for me.”
‘Surviving Hitler’
Author Andrea Warren’s stage adaptation of her nonfiction book “Surviving Hitler: A Boy in the Nazi Death Camps” will be performed at 8:30 p.m. April 9, 2 p.m. April 10 (sold out) and 7:30 p.m. April 12-14 at the Jewish Community Center’s Lewis and Shirley White Theatre, 5801 W. 115th St., Overland Park. Tickets are $18. See thejkc.org.
This story was originally published April 6, 2022 at 5:00 AM.
