Performing the Unspoken: Documentary Theatre, Cultural Memory, and the Post-Holocaust Histories of Romanian Jews Sold Under Communism

Abstract

This article examines how documentary theatre can function as a counter-archive for suppressed post-Holocaust histories, focusing on the secret state-controlled sale of Romanian Jews to Israel between 1965 and 1989. While historians such as Ioanid (2005) and Deletant (1995) have documented the political and economic mechanisms of this human-trade system, the lived experiences of those who were priced, negotiated, or deemed “unprofitable” remain largely absent from cultural memory. Drawing on a decade of fieldwork across Romania, Israel, and the United States, this project transforms 27 life-story interviews into a dramaturgical structure that foregrounds the emotional and ethical dimensions of this displacement. Through verbatim micro-scenes, interactive valuation games, and participatory dramaturgies developed in performances in Bucharest at the Odeon Theatre and the State Jewish Theatre, in New York the Lark Theatre, and the Center for Jewish History, the project exposes the bureaucratic logic that reduced human lives to political currency. Crucially, the documentary performance renders intelligible what is otherwise difficult to assimilate in archival form: the testimonies, historical data, and statistical realities. In performance, these materials become comprehensible through the affective mechanisms of empathy and catharsis, enabling spectators to engage with history both emotionally and cognitively. Ultimately, the article argues that staging these testimonies constitutes an act of symbolic justice that restores agency to marginalized voices and fosters new forms of collective witnessing.