We sat down with Beth talking about Niusia, a show about Niusia, a Holocaust survivor, and 80 years on from the liberation of Auschwitz there are nearly no survivors of the Holocaust left. Through NIUSIA, her grandaughter Beth weaves together memories, handed-down stories and interviews to examine the precarity of identity, and the haphazard cultural legacy second, third and fourth generation immigrants are handed.
- Thank you for chatting with A Young(ish) Perspective! Introduce us to who you are and what your doing at the Edinburgh Fringe this year?
Howdy! My name is Beth Paterson. I’m an Aussie, queer, Jewish, playwright, and performer. I am bringing my award-winning one-woman-show NIUSIA to Summerhall this Edinburgh Fringe.
Niusia was the name of my late grandmother. Through this show I ask “how do you honour a woman you hardly knew?…and didn’t really like?”
Niusia was a Holocaust survivor. Charming, savvy, and–if you ask her granddaughter, Beth–a pretty mean lady. She’s ready to learn who Niusia was, but soon discovers there is no straightforward story.
Reading, interviewing, and weaving memories and handed-down stories, I sets out to understand her nana’s complex legacy. I give voice to the cruel thoughts you shouldn’t have about your holocaust-surviving nana, stumbles upon my own Jewishness (something I used only to evade school church services), and ultimately confronts how deeply embedded these horrific memories are in my family line. I ask: “I’ve somehow always known these stories. When did I learn these stories, and how?”
Come Journey with me as I am shown the tenderness I missed out on, learn to laugh at the unlaughable, and wade through the complexity of trauma-laden memories, love, and familial relationships.
- A Youngish Perspective platforms accessible arts and champions the huge scope of different perspectives – can you tell us about the show you’re taking to Edinburgh Festival Fringe as if you’re flyering to both a young first-time-Fringe goer and a festival veteran returning every year?
NIUSIA has a pretty wide net in terms of audience base! NIUSIA is for theatre nerds, lovers of dark laughs, and anyone with a complicated family. It’s for Jewish folk—religious, cultural, or just figuring it out—and for 2nd to 4th gen immigrants making sense of where they come from. Kin-keepers, history buffs, mother-daughter duos, and anyone who’s ever asked, “Wait… how did we get here?”—this one’s for you.
A pitch for a first time fringe goer:
“NIUSIA is a raw, funny, deeply personal show about family, trauma, and finding identity in the mess. Big heart. Big humour. And all the things you’re not supposed to say about your ballbusting Holocaust-surviving Nana. Dark history, Jewish-gallows humour, big heart. You’ll feel things.
A pitch for a festival veteran: A darkly funny, deeply personal one-woman show about Holocaust survival, intergenerational trauma, and Jewish gallows humour. Think memoir meets memory play—with heart, bite, and a kickass grandmother.”
- NIUSA asks the question “What does remembrance look like when all I remember is the space where questions should go?”, what has the process of developing this show looked like and what has it taught you about yourself and your relationship to identity?
I brought the first sketches of NIUSIA to my director and co-creator, Kat Yates, in November 2019. I wanted to write a show about my nana Niusia. This was a woman who selflessly put her life on the line again and again to save the lives of other people in Auschwitz, found refuge in Australia, and built an absolutely kick-ass life in Melbourne. What captured us was the question of how could this woman be the same person who I remember begging not to visit. Our weekly Saturday morning visits were tense, filled with her sarcastic remarks, wounded looks, and heavy sighs. Please mum, she’s so cruel. Do we have to visit?
Kat was enthralled by the premise and instantly agreed to work with me. What followed was a remarkable 3-year period where I wrote sketches and imaginings of memories and stories. At the beginning of 2023, Kat and I locked in a brilliant production team, secured a workshop performance, and called our team in for a first read. Oh boy, it was lacklustre. At that stage, the script was a tome in both weight and snooze-factor, but Kat had the wisdom to pay attention to when our team leaned forward and their eyes sharpened. We learned that this hodgepodge of stories and vignettes was missing something crucial: the woman who connected Nana and I. Namely, my mother, Susie.
My generous mother sat with myself, Kat, and our recordist, and shared with us her stories and memories. Kat and I launched into work, piecing interview snippets together and devising out of discoveries and moments pulled from my mother’s recording. The added element of my mother’s voice transformed the work. Stories that felt at best naff, and at worst, voyeuristic told through me, were electric coming from the woman who saw it all: the screaming matches, the business nous, smoke-filled bridge weekend parties. Not before long the show that is now NIUSIA was before us. Not in its final form, but… close.
During this whole process, something else emerged. Week upon week I would bring fragments of new writing to show Kat, and week upon week she would point to some detail and go “Beth, what are you on about. You’re going to need to explain this to me.” And it was at this point that Kat’s Lutheran upbringing began to stand out starkly against my… Jewish? Upbringing? I say Jewish?? because, well, I didn’t go to a Jewish school. I never had a bat mitzvah. I didn’t know anything about being Jewish, religious or otherwise. And until writing this show there was nothing I could point to in my life that I could confidently say “hey, that’s because I’m Jewish.”
But… whatever Kat was demanding elaboration for was usually… something that I suppose, was… Jewish. A turn of phrase, or the matter of family lunches, or attitudes to debates and education. This slow and somewhat bewildering discovery organically wove itself into the show. I dance about the stage speaking about my insecurities of being Jew-ish and about the unexpected ways in which I learned about the history from which I emerged, like watching The Sound of Music as a child and thinking my family were just like the Von Trapps. The work’s scope grew to speak to the diasporic experience: the impact of assimilation and what it’s like to have parents and grandmothers that grew up in the maelstrom of WWII and its aftershocks and asks: given how disconnected I am from the culture, what is my relationship to this history and to this culture?
In many ways, my remembrance has been shaped not by what I was told, but by what was missing—the silences, the contradictions, the spaces where questions lingered unanswered. The process of making NIUSIA taught me that remembrance can take the form of reconstruction, of sensing meaning in absence. This absence became the very material of the work. The creation of this show prompted me to dig deep into these questions. Not knowing anything about this culture and history became the basis of a relationship with this culture and history. It was something that I accidentally, and then very consciously, began to nurture. I have learned that identity can be created and nurtured: my Jewish cultural identity is as strong as it is because of the act of making, and will continue to be made and remade as I grow and interact with this aspect of my life.
- Throughout NIUSA Beth does not leave the stage and all discoveries are made within the set that already exists, how does this metaphor interact with your own relationship to your identity and self discovery?
Growing up, nothing was hidden from me. At four years of age I asked where babies came from. My beloved mother told me straight up, without a hint of embarrassment, and I told everyone at kindergarten the next day with the same matter-of-fact candor. You see, my mum grew up surrounded by secrets and “no-go zones”. Ask the wrong question and all hell would break loose: my nana had an acid tongue and my mum was no stranger to her cruel, pointed outbursts. The messaging was clear: ask at your peril. My mother made it her mission to ensure I never experienced that same fear. However, this openness also meant that nothing was ever handed to me with kid gloves. It was only when I got to university and began off-handedly sharing the fact that my nana had been forced to work under Josef Mengele–the infamous “doctor” behind the eugenics studies in Auschwitz–that I learned that these stories had significance. Wild, right? Nothing was out of bounds, but also nothing demanded reverence. I was handed my nana’s stories off-handedly, and rarely with the sting that my mother had learned them. The offset to this was that my mother walked away from the Jewish community as a teenager: that world represented great pain and my mother staunchly disagreed with the place women occupied in traditional circles. And so, I grew up agnostic, attended an anglican school, and had little connection with the Jewish community. I had an open book as a mother, a sick cruel grandmother who I knew never to ask anything of, and no narrative about what to ask and how to make head or tail of it. Everything I now know about my family’s history and culture was always there, but it was up to me to dive in and ask “what on earth is this? What’s here? What’s my connection to all of this?”.
The deep-dive I have taken into my Nana’s stories and the history from which we emerge has indelibly changed me. However, the discoveries I have made aren’t imported or invented–they have been excavated from within. Like the set in NIUSIA, nothing new has been brought in, but everything is available to be examined and re-examined, re-contextualised, and eventually (re-)claimed.
- Who would your surprise dream audience member be?
oh my GOODNESS. I have two. Miriam Margoyles is one: a loud, queer, Jewish actress who is unafraid to ruffle feathers and who stands proudly for what she believes in? Need I say more? The other is the brilliant Magda Szubanski, the Australian actor and comedian. Her book Reckoning: a Memoir shook me and was a major influence on the creation of NIUSIA.