“From Country X”: An Early Play and Performance in Hungarian on the Holocaust
“From Country X”: An Early Play and Performance in Hungarian on the Holocaust

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with the – probably – earliest Hungarian-language theater play and performance representing the Holocaust, premiered in Cluj in 1945, during the leadership of Jenő Janovics. A play by a little-known writer, a survivor himself, it was performed a few times and then completely forgotten, as the whole oeuvre of the author. The five-act drama tells a story of persecution, deportation, and the liberation of a death camp by the Russian Army. The article aims at reconstructing and analyzing the context, the (unpublished) play, and the performance, as well as the little-known playwright’s biography and works and his complicated career, not devoid of pseudonyms and deceptive identity games. The article’s findings are that a Hungarian-language theater in Cluj, in 1945, under the progressive artistic leadership of Jenő Janovics, was a socially relevant institution; but the silence about the Holocaust following shortly after the end of the World War II, erased from the stage the topic, the play, and the author, too.

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