UNDERGROUND

Play by Joshua Sobol, 1991

Underground (1991) is the third and final play in Joshua Sobol's triptych about the Vilna ghetto during the Holocaust. The play focuses on the secret typhus ward located in the Vilna ghetto. During his research on the Vilna ghetto, Sobol was fascinated to learn that the typhus ward was so secret that even some of the physicians in the hospital did not know that it existed.

Because of the atrocious conditions in which the Jews live, typhus spreads in the ghetto. This deadly disease has to be contained and kept secret in order for the ghetto to survive. If Obersturmführer Hans Kittel and SS Dr. Jaegger discover the outbreak of typhus, they clearly will murder everyone in the hospital and liquidate the ghetto.

Sobol's play, like Ghetto and Adam, is a dramatic retelling of a historically true story by a character who eyewitnessed the events—narrated in the present by a survivor of the ghetto. In Underground a patient is in the hospital in Israel; his nurse finds the diary he possesses and reads about the typhus ward in the ghetto in 1943 (the patient in Israel in the present had been afflicted by typhus and had been saved by Dr. Berka Weiner). Through the anonymous man's diary, Sobol tells the story of how Weiner, his colleague and lover Dr. Sonya Solodova, and Dr. Gottlieb establish the secret typhus ward, with the blessing of Judenrat leader Jacob Gens, in the ghetto hospital, thus saving the lives of the Vilna Jews. These doctors successfully hide the typhus outbreak from the Nazis through a series of deceptive tricks. The doctors provide all of their typhus patients with fake symptoms, which they must rehearse and pretend to be afflicted by when Kittel and Jaegger come to inspect the ward, and the physicians create alternate sets of charts—the actual medical charts that indicate the progression of their disease and the fake charts that inform the Nazi visitors that the patients are afflicted by noncontagious illnesses that do not pose a threat to the community. As Gens points out to Weiner, the Nazis fear the outbreak of contagious diseases and would quickly destroy the ghetto inhabitants to prevent the spread of the illness.

The outbreak of typhus begins with the illness of Judith, who has survived the mass killings in the Ponar forest. Nazi soldiers have murdered thousands of Jewish men, women, and children at Ponar, but a few women, such as Judith, are only wounded and presumed dead by the perpetrators, who then leave the forest. Five of the women have survived and managed to come to the ghetto, where they tell their story to Gens. The survivors tend to be women because the Nazis murder the Jewish men in the morning and the women and children in the afternoon; those men who are wounded but not killed eventually bleed to death because they must feign death for hours while the Nazis are present, but the women who survive the shootings do not have to wait all day to leave the death pits, for they are shot just before the Nazis depart. After Judith returns and tells her story, the doctors discover that she has typhus. She eventually recovers and becomes pregnant by her boyfriend Tana. This pregnancy presents another problem in the ghetto because the Nazis have ordered that all pregnancies must be aborted, yet Judith insists upon keeping her baby. When Nazi soldiers discover that a woman has given birth to a baby, they habitually kill the baby and the entire family.

Dr. Berka Weiner is a caring and humane doctor who reluctantly agrees to head the typhus ward. He is not optimistic about the chances of fooling Kittel and Jaegger, but he agrees to try, partly because he falls in love with Dr. Solodova. Sobol's play dramatizes the personal interests and strong emotions that dictate people's actions in this time of crisis. The playwright also juxtaposes the humanitarians Weiner and Solodova with the selfish and egocentric Professor Lishafsky, who sells drugs for personal profit even though his people, who desperately need the medications, are suffering from disease.

As the play draws to a close, Gens confesses to Kittel that he has been protecting the armed partisans in the ghetto as they flee to the forest. Kittel responds by assassinating the ghetto leader; Gens's death provides closure to the final play in Sobol's triptych. As the play concludes the sounds of machine gun fire are heard, suggesting the liquidation of the Vilna ghetto, which historically occurred only nine days after the murder of Jacob Gens.

—Eric Sterling