NARRATOR - ('MICHAEL ROSEN'):
This is the story of two stories.
One story is the story of what I know really happened.
One story is the story of what I imagine happened.
These are the stories of Oscar and Rachel
Oscar and Rachel live in Poland.
OSCAR: I am Oscar
RACHEL: I am Rachel
OSCAR: It’s the First World War.
I am in the Army
I wear a red cross on my arm
It shows that I am in the medical corps
I care for the sick, the wounded and the dying.
I send a photograph of me in my army uniform
to my brothers in America.
My brother Martin is in the Army.
He’s in the Army
But he’s on the other side.
Is he my enemy?
Could it be that one day we will meet on the battlefield.
And we have to kill each other?
What is this madness?
NARRATOR: The war comes to an end
The great powers sign a peace treaty to end all wars.
OSCAR: I move to France.
Here I will be safe.
Here I mend clocks.
I mend watches and clocks.
Clocks and watches.
Here I meet Rachel.
She’s from Poland.
She is beautiful and I love her.
RACHEL: Here I meet Oscar
we get engaged.
I am so happy.
We are both so happy.
We send a photo of us getting engaged
to Oscar’s brothers in America.
OSCAR: We’re going to have a beautiful life.
We get married.
Martin is the best man at our wedding.
Just think
One year I could have killed him
he could have killed me.
Now he’s the best man at our wedding.
We are so happy.
RACHEL: But we hear that there is going to be another war.
Germany is going to invade.
So we flee from our home.
OSCAR: Our brother Martin flees too.
RACHEL: We go west
with hundreds, thousands, millions of others.
OSCAR: We are in the town of Niort
Martin is not far away.
RACHEL: The Germans invade.
OSCAR: People talk of ‘The Fall of France’
People talk of France being ‘occupied’.
The Occupation.
What does it mean?
RACHEL: It means there are soldiers on our streets.
It means that they start to draw up lists.
We are on one list.
We are Jews.
We are on the list for Jews.
OSCAR: What does it mean?
It means that we have to wear yellow stars on our coats.
On the yellow star it says, ‘Jew’.
It means that we have to give away
nearly all our belongings
We have to give away nearly all our money.
Here we work in the market,
selling second hand clothes.
RACHEL: People are poor and hungry
and they buy and sell
and sell and buy
their old clothes,
they sell
the clothes of people who die.
OSCAR: I write to my brothers in America.
I ask them for help.
I tell them we are running out of money.
I send love to their children.
Did some of the children go to England?
to London?
My nephew and my niece in London.
Yes.
We are a big family
spread out across the world
Poland, France, England, America.
I wonder what’s happening to our brothers and sister
and my nephew in Poland?
They’re in an occupied country too.
We hear that bombs are falling on London.
RACHEL: We hear stories that
Jews are being rounded up,
and put in camps here in France.
Jews are being rounded up and put on trains.
Jews are being sent away
and not coming back.
Where are they going?
OSCAR: People have invented a crazy name for
where they’re going.
They call it ‘Pitchipoï’
We Jews say, ‘We won’t go to Pitchipoï!’
‘Nous n’irons pas à Pitchipoï!’
We hope that Martin is safe.
But we don’t know.
RACHEL: We hear that Jews are safe in Nice.
Nice is a long way away
800 miles or more.
Could we get to Nice?
Nice is grand and posh.
Beautiful film stars go there for holidays
and rich people gamble there and dance…
But not any more.
We hear that the great hotels
are full of refugees like us.
Sleeping in the corridors and on the stairs.
But they’re safe.
OSCAR: Rachel and I talk.
We won’t go to Pitchipoï
We will go to Nice.
If we go, and we’re on the road
and the police, or the army
or the special security men
find us
we will be arrested and sent away on a train.
Do we stay here and wait for the soldiers to send us away on a train
or do we go?
RACHEL: We decide to go.
We are the only ones who know how we do this.
We don’t send a message to America.
OSCAR: Imagine us
ripping off our yellow stars
and throwing them away.
RACHEL: Imagine us
running in the night,
sleeping in the fields
sleeping in barns
begging farmers to take us in.
OSCAR: Imagine us
hitching lifts from a horse and cart
going to market.
borrowing bikes till they break down.
begging for food
begging for clothes
selling Rachel’s rings
RACHEL: Imagine that I tell some people
I can mend their clocks
and they give me a few francs
and we buy some bread.
But we have to keep moving.
OSCAR: Anyone who helps us
is in danger
If the police or the soldiers
see what they’re doing
they could be arrested
or sent away
or shot.
RACHEL: Imagine us
asking people the way
to the next town.
OSCAR: Imagine us
pretending to be someone else.
But we know we have Polish accents.
We have to pretend we are not Jewish.
RACHEL: It’s hard to know
who is helping the soldiers
and who is against them
in the Resistance, as people call it.
OSCAR: Imagine us moving in the night.
The stars watch us.
The trees watch us.
The cows and horses in the fields
watch us.
We have to keep going.
Only in Nice will we be safe.
We won’t go to Pitchipoï
RACHEL: And we get to Nice.
We arrive.
OSCAR: Imagine us
walking the streets
hand in hand
Imagine us
pretending to be film stars
strolling on the promenade
overlooking the Baie des Anges
the Bay of Angels.
RACHEL: We see that Nice has filled up
with Jewish refugees.
We’re safe.
There are soldiers.
Italian soldiers
but they’re not going to arrest us
or send us away.
Imagine them
sharing their rations with us.
OSCAR: We stay in a hotel
and it is, as they said.
People sleeping in the corridors.
There’s food here from the Red Cross.
We eat under great chandeliers.
We sit on the grand staircase.
We imagine film stars dancing in the ballroom
RACHEL: We wonder what is happening to Martin.
Where is he?
Where is our brother?
What’s happening in Poland?
What’s happening in London?
OSCAR: Imagine us
Rachel and me
RACHEL: Me and Oscar
we dance in the empty ballroom
OSCAR: We pretend that a band is playing.
And we dance.
RACHEL: A waltz.
OSCAR: A foxtrot.
RACHEL: A Charleston.
OSCAR: We imagine the music.
RACHEL: We are so happy.
OSCAR: But there are rumours that
this can’t last
this won’t last.
RACHEL: We hear
that an Italian man
has hired boats and is going to take
us to North Africa
where we will be really safe.
OSCAR: Get ready he says.
RACHEL: We are ready.
OSCAR: We imagine getting on board
sailing in the sun
to North Africa
wind on our faces
white tips to the waves.
RACHEL: We will be free at last.
OSCAR: But then
we hear
that the Italians have to go
and the boats can’t leave.
We have to stay in the hotels
or we must run to the mountains.
RACHEL: Some of us run.
Some of us stay.
OSCAR: We decide to stay.
RACHEL: Why do we decide to stay?
You will have to imagine
why we decide to stay.
OSCAR: And then the Nazis arrive.
RACHEL: They march about demanding to know
who is Jewish.
They grab us
and poke us
and beat us
‘Are you a Jew?’
‘You’re a Jew, aren't you?’
OSCAR: And then they put us on trains.
Trains to a camp called Drancy.
RACHEL: We are in a camp with thousands of other Jews.
It used to be a block of flats
now it’s a camp with barbed wire all round
on the outside.
Police and soldiers and guards march up and down.
It’s filthy
there’s hardly any food.
the toilets don’t work
Every so often a few hundred of us
are taken away.
People talk of Pitchipoï
OSCAR: People talk of some guys digging a tunnel
to get out of the camp.
But they’re discovered
and told that they are going to be sent away.
And so are we.
RACHEL: We’re taken to a station.
We’re put on a train.
These aren’t carriages
These are cattle trucks.
We’re pushed into the cattle trucks.
We have no food.
there are no toilets.
OSCAR: We’re on this train for three days, three nights.
RACHEL: We look out through the slats
in the sides of our cattle truck
looking at France slipping by
France where where we thought we’d be safe.
OSCAR: France where I mended people’s clocks.
France where we learned French
we see people sitting in their windows
eating their evening meal.
They will close their shutters
and go to bed.
RACHEL: We think of that moment when
we thought we were free
and we danced in the ballroom
we thought we were going to sail to North Africa
the wind in our hair,
the white tips of the waves
OSCAR: We think of Martin
We think of our brothers in America
We think of our nephews and niece
in Poland and England.
RACHEL: Here we don’t eat.
The smell is disgusting
OSCAR: Babies are crying
children are crying
We are jammed up against strangers,.
And old woman dies.
RACHEL: Why is this happening to us?
The law says that you arrest criminals,
bad people.
We’re not criminals.
You try criminals in court.
If they do bad things
you put them in prison,.
We have done no bad things.
OSCAR: We are here because of who we are.
We are in this hell
because we are Jews.
RACHEL: Why do we humans do this to each other,
deciding that one kind of people are good
one kind of people are bad
and then try to to kill them?
Wasn’t that First World War
going to be the war to end all wars?
OSCAR: I think of my brothers and sisters
and nephews and nieces spread out across the world
in Poland, France, England and America.
RACHEL: There are whispers jumping from truck to truck
Rumours.
We hear that some men managed to escape
from the train.
the same guys who tried to
escape through the tunnel in the camp.
OSCAR: How did they do it?
RACHEL: Imagine if Oscar and I
OSCAR: if Rachel and me
had done that.,
RACHEL: But we didn’t.
OSCAR: We arrive at a place.
A camp
I look at it.
I know where this is.
I know it.
It’s where I was born.
I was born in the town of Oswiecim, in Poland
Here the soldiers call it by its German name,
Auschwitz.
I have arrived back where I began.
RACHEL: Is this Pitchipoï?
Is this the place we don’t come back from?
NARRATOR: It is and it was.
Oscar and Rachel didn’t come back from
Auschwitz
Their letters to America
sat in a cupboard unseen for years
Their photos sent to America
sat in a cupboard for years.
But then, much, much later
when those brothers and sisters
and nephews and nieces died,
cupboards were opened
letters and photos were found
and shared in America and England
and
the bare bones of this story came to light
the places, the dates,
Niort, Nice, Drancy, Paris Auschwitz
the train.
OSCAR:
And you might wonder
what became of my brother Martin?
Four policemen knocked on his door
in the middle of the night
in a village in the countryside.
They handed him over to the Nazis
he was put on a train to Auschwitz
and he never came back.
NARRATOR: That was a story
of ordinary people
in a family spread out across the world:
Poland, France, England, America.
I am part of that family.
I am the son of the nephew in London.
------
copyright Michael Rosen 2025
If you would like to use this play, please get in touch with me c/o of my agent Charles Walker and Olivia Martin on OMartin@unitedagents.co.uk
[I wrote this play for Professor Helen Weinstein and History Works TV so that school students in Cambridge and Cambridgeshire could use it to turn into a drama and/or dance piece using the words of the three characters and movement from people in Oscar and Rachel's lives.
I also tell this story in 'The Missing' and 'On the move' both published by Walker Books.
The story of the men who escaped from the train is in the book 'One Day' also published by Walker Books.
Another story related to my family is in 'Please Write Soon' (Scholastic) which tells a fictionalised story of what happened to my father's cousin in Poland. ]
