Hannah Moscovitch's East of Berlin delves into uncharted Holocaust play territory, focusing on another kind of victim.

Growing up in Paraguay, Rudi, the son of a German expatriate, discovers his dad was one of the SS doctors who performed brutal experiments on humans in Nazi death camps. Throw in the fact that Rudi's lover, Sarah, is Jewish and the daughter of an Auschwitz survivor, and you have a daring piece of drama.

"What do you do with that (information)?" Moscovitch, 30, asks. "Your parents are the new definition of evil. That is your parent. Your parent is a monster, a war criminal monster. What do you do with that? How do you cope with inherited guilt and from there comes this play."

Moscovitch was inspired to write East of Berlin after reading the real-life stories in Peter Sichrovksy's Born Guilty and Dan Bar-On's Legacy of Silence.

"I came across two books that were filled with interviews with the children of Nazis, the children of either prominent Nazis or Nazis that had been particularly vicious and manned the concentration camps," Moscovitch says. "Their stories were fascinating. You wouldn't believe the shit they did - things like urinate on their parents' graves. Some swore not to have children because they didn't want to pass this on, Nazism I guess. Some converted to Judaism, married Jews, moved to Israel, tree-planted in Israel, fought in Israeli wars, just crazy stuff. Also, the interviews I read were conducted by the children of Holocaust survivors, so the subtext of the interview was 'I'm sorry my father killed your father.' That was really interesting to me dramatically."

Born in Ottawa, Moscovitch resides in Toronto, where she is a playwright-in-residence at Tarragon Theatre. East of Berlin is the young dramatist's first full-length work. Half-Jewish herself, Moscovitch was well-informed but was still taken aback by the two aforementioned books.

"I was shocked that I had never come across that perspective," she says. "I had never seen anything about what had happened to the children of the Nazis. Also, the Holocaust is such an extreme event in history that we don't talk a lot about the fall-out and the trauma. Literally, there is a generation of Jews alive now that were raised by children of the Holocaust; I can only say that is so fucked up. You can't come away from that unscathed. I think the legacy of the Holocaust is as interesting to me as the Holocaust is, so I wanted to write about that, and there was something about those books that shocked me into a realization of what that legacy is."

EAST OF BERLIN
Manitoba Theatre Centre
Nov. 19 - Dec. 5, The Tom Hendry Theatre Warehouse