Nobody Told Me
Nobody Told Me
On the square to watch a Masterpiece "Nobody Told Me" , very early on and you are looking at a Production of the Year contender. A Poignant, reflective, wrenching and deeply compassionate play exploring life in the Warsaw Ghetto, Poland for Jewish residents under German occupation. Nazi's the instigaters - Swastikas, German efficiency, in uniform, Poland, WWII, heil Hitler.
Nobody Told Me is a contemporary stage play written by Luc Albinski. It’s a dramatic theatrical work inspired by true family history and the experiences of a Jewish doctor in World War II Warsaw. It follows the emotional journey of Wanda, now in her 80s, and her son Luc (the playwright), as they explore long-buried family secrets about Wanda’s mother — Dr Halina Rotstein, a Jewish physician who worked in the Warsaw Ghetto’s Czyste Hospital during the Holocaust. The story shifts between present-day conversations and flashbacks to the 1930s–40s in Warsaw, showing how Halina and her circle of young doctors faced impossible moral choices while trying to care for others under Nazi oppression. Rather than simply recounting historical events, the play focuses on private emotional landscapes, memory, identity, survival, and silence — especially on how hidden histories shape later generations.
The play explores Dr. Halina's relationship with her daughter. Halina’s relationship with her daughter is the emotional heart of Nobody Told Me. It is not a relationship built on warmth or easy intimacy, but on duty, silence, sacrifice, and deferred love—the kind of love that survives catastrophe by becoming disciplined, restrained, and often misunderstood.
Halina loves her daughter fiercely, but her love is filtered through survival. As a doctor in the Warsaw Ghetto, Halina lives in a world where sentimentality is a liability. Every day is an emergency. Every decision has consequences measured in lives lost or saved. In this context, motherhood cannot look like softness—it must look like control.
To her daughter, this can feel like emotional distance. Halina does not always explain herself. She does not narrate her fear. She does not confess her pain. Instead, she acts:
She chooses work over emotional presence.
She prioritizes survival over comfort.
She withholds information to protect her child from terror.
From the daughter’s perspective, this restraint can register as coldness. But from Halina’s perspective, love means keeping her child alive at all costs, even if that means being misunderstood forever.
This is one of the play’s cruelest truths:
Sometimes love survives only by disguising itself as severity.
The production blends intimate storytelling with expressionistic, post-Brechtian and physical theatre conventions, aiming to make the audience feel the moral weight and human resilience beneath historical facts. Themes include memory and secrecy, duty versus survival, humanism in inhuman conditions, and the inheritance of identity. Music by Jeanne Zaidel-Rudolph and choreography by Vicky Friedman contribute to its immersive atmosphere. Wonderful design and sets by Wilhelm Desbergen and Gwendi Gourley. We are transported to the 30-40's, this is important because the performers move time. Spell-binding, dancing, letting the years go by.
Cast Members
Liezl de Kock
André Lötter
Aimèe Mika Komorowsky
Mamodibe Ramodibe
Damon Berry
Khuthadzo Ndou
Dihan Keun
Jade Scheepers
Andile Mgeyi
Ngwedi Ramphele
They are all outstanding performers, never a moment out of character - moving, emotive, poignant, heavy, nonchalant, murderous, heil Hitler. Soviets in the mix too.
The play is described as a tribute to those who healed others while facing immense danger, and as an exploration of silence and revelation within families and history.
It asks broader questions about identity, inherited silence, moral choices under oppression, and how stories once hidden can shape understanding in the present.
Congratulations Ilina Perianova with assistant director Renos Spanoudes and the whole team for a great show and a deserved standing.
