Rehearsal again tonight. We're now on a 7-10 Mon. through Thu. schedule.



If anyone is interested, here's the info:





Rosenstrasse



by Terry Lawrence

directed by Pauline Tyer





April 16, 17, 23, 24 at 8:00 p.m. at the Wesley Center



Tickets are $10 for adults, $8 for seniors, and $7 for students.



The play is based on a true story of love and non-violent resistance in Nazi Berlin. It focuses on five Christian women who struggle to secure the release of their Jewish husbands from the Nazis:



"Up until early 1943, Jews married to Germans had been exempted from the death camp deportations. But during what the Gestapo called the “Final Roundup of Jews,” these Jews, mainly men married to German wives, were arrested and taken to a pre-deportation collection center at Rosenstrasse 2-4, in the heart of Berlin. The German women quickly discovered this collection center, and began to meet each other there. Soon they began calling out in one voice, "Give us our husbands back." As many as 600 or more gathered together that first day, and as many as 6,000 may have joined in at various times as the protests grew day after day, for a week. Again and again, the police scattered the women with threats to shoot them down in the streets, but each time they advanced again, with increasing solidarity although they were unarmed, unorganized and leaderless. An open confrontation with the Gestapo, on the Gestapo's front doorstep.



“Without warning, the guards began setting up machine guns,” Charlotte Israel recalled. “Then they directed them at the crowd and shouted: ‘If you don’t go now, we’ll shoot.’ The movement surged backward. But then, for the first time, we really hollered. Now, we couldn’t care less. They’re going to shoot in any case, so now we’ll yell too, we thought. We yelled, ‘Murderer, murderer, murderer, murderer.’” Astonishingly, after a week of this, Goebbels suddenly ordered their release, and nearly 2,000 Jews were freed. The gathering on Rosenstrasse — the only known public German protest against the deportation of Jews — provides proof that successful protest was possible even in Nazi Germany, underscoring that citizens everywhere bear responsibility for the actions of their governments. At the war’s end, no less than 98 percent of German Jews still alive in Germany and registered with the police were married to non-Jewish Germans." (from Rosenstrasse: Resistance of the Heart)