Holocaust diarist is played by actress granddaughter in The Good and The True

 
War story: Isobel Pravda plays her grandmother Hana in The Good and The True
Dalya Alberge11 January 2013

A Holocaust survivor is to be portrayed by her own actress granddaughter in a new play for the London stage.

Hana Pravda — who died in 2008 aged 92 — suffered extreme brutality in the Nazi death camps, including beatings, starvation and other horrors which she said were too painful to record in her wartime diaries.

Now she is to be played by her son’s daughter, Isobel Pravda, in The Good and The True.

Translated from the Czech of the award-winning original, the play will be staged this month and will coincide with National Holocaust Memorial Day, which commemorates the victims of Nazi persecution.

The Good and The True conveys the horrors endured by Hana, an actress, and Milos Dobry, a sportsman, as Jews in Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Both survived Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.

Hana never saw her husband Alexander Munk again after they were deported to the death camps.

Her obituaries recorded that she was living testimony to the power of theatre to sustain the human spirit through the greatest of adversities. Having been sustained by Goethe and Gogol, she later recalled: “We had so little to eat, we were freezing all the time, but the sheer joy of being able to act... fed our souls.”

She was forced on a death march to Bergen-Belsen, but managed to escape to Prague, only to be devastated by news of her husband’s death. In her diary, one of the most vivid accounts of the Holocaust in the Imperial War Museum, she wrote that without him, “my life is meaningless”.

After the war, she rebuilt her life in Britain with her second husband, fellow actor George Pravda. The actors Dame Sybil Thorndike and Sir John Gielgud recognised their talent and helped them. Hana found success as an actress on television and film, playing Orson Welles’s wife in John Huston’s The Kremlin Letter.

Her granddaughter, who has had roles in the BBC’s Murphy’s Law and Kenneth Branagh’s forthcoming film thriller Jack Ryan, said: “The terrible consequences of being Jewish that my grandmother faced are ones endured by many ethnic groups, and must always be viewed as a brutal example of man’s inhumanity to man. I feel honoured to be able to tell her incredible story of strife and survival.”

The play — to be staged at the former New End Theatre in Hampstead from January 29 — was co-written by Brian Daniels, a playwright and producer. He said of the survivors: “You can only marvel at the human qualities of endurance.”

The production is supported by the Czech ambassador and the embassy of the Czech Republic.

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