Mutters Courage

George Tabori had a keen sense of humour in the face of horror, of the absurd punchline in the realm of evil. In My Mother’s Courage, he tells the seemingly impossible story of a sixty-year-old Jewish woman who, in 1944, is arrested onthe streets of Budapest and deported to Auschwitz in a cattle car together with4,030 others. And who is the only one to survive. This impossible story is a true one. Elsa Tabori lived it. Her son wrote it down. Since then, it has become part of the enduring record of oral history — of course,only for those among us who believe that history cannot simply be “left behind”. According to a survey conducted as early as 2015, 81% of Germans would have liked to do just that with regard to the Holocaust. “It’s obvious: the Germans will never forgive us Jews for Auschwitz,” said Israeli psychoanalyst Zvi Rex. In a broader sense, Tabori’s tribute to his mother is a tribute to all mothers whosecourage, humour and will to survive gave their children the possibility of comingto terms with their own trauma. Over the past 30 years, the production has been performed more than 170 times — including in New York and Los Angeles.