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by Abe D. Jones, Jr.
Special to the News & Record

The stage lights are coming up as a sustained, high-pitched note seems to reach the Broach Theatre stage from a European train whistle. Recalling the train that hauled thousands of people to the Nazi concentration camps, it is an appropriate beginning for a story of the Holocaust as experienced by children before and during World War II.

Yet that first note of Let Your Children Tell isn't from a train, but from a violin. It is followed by other haunting notes from the same violin. Written for the production by Wayne Seymour, the music is ably performed by violinist-turned-actor Ulric Schweizer. He and five other Touring Theatre Ensemble of North Carolina players are then heard telling true stories of the great crime of the last century in the production that runs through Sunday.

Narrator Robin Doby is sometimes a narrator, sometimes a mother or a friend as she links the stories of five children. Some were not even teenagers when the persecutions began, but all experienced the long descent from punitive laws against the Jews in Germany to the organization of death factories in German-occupied Europe for Jews and other "non-Aryan" minorities. Strident and violent as a Gestapo officer, Doby is sympathetic and touching as she plays an old servant greeting a little girl she knows is bound for death.

The stories of unimaginable horror are told matter-of-factly for the most part by the young characters. Their individual stories of horror, collected and skillfully interwoven by author/director Brenda Schleunes, show the awful human cost of racial prejudice and injustice run amok.

Schleunes has selected passages from diaries and letters to show how family affection, concerns about boyfriends, clothes or education were shattered and submerged in the struggle to stay alive in a sea of death and hate.

Melanie Duncan strongly portrays Ursula, a young German Jewish girl who has a reprieve in Holland before the Nazi persecution follows her there. Her fears, feelings and bravery come through, despite her desperate situation and maltreatment, and so does her developing love for a fellow prisoner.

A bubbly Lisa Dames is just right as a young Hungarian girl who can't believe what is happening as the persecutions come closer and closer, then lead to her death. Gaye Taylor Upchurch is saved by a chance to flee Czechoslovakia in a Jewish children's transport to England in the last days before World War II.

Schweizer, whose violin accompanies many of the scenes, also tells his story. He is Karl, a Gypsy who lives in Austria. There the long reach of the Nazis found him, but after many horrors, including the destruction of his family, he survived.

On a bare stage, handling a minimum of props, the players carry their words and thoughts into movements well choreographed by Anne Deloria. Designed to tour, the production was commissioned by the North Carolina Council on the Holocaust.

No strong appeal for humanity and understanding of the evils of hate and prejudice can be imagined than the actual words of these children.