TORONTO, February 12, 2002 -- Glendon Theatre at York University presents the Canadian premiere of the Swiss play Aimée and Jaguar on Mar.11-12, based on the true story of the tragic love between Elisabeth Wust, a Nazi officer’s wife in 1940s Berlin, and Felice Schragenheim, a Jewish lesbian who was sent to her death at Bergen-Belsen.
A riveting two-woman show performed by the Swiss actresses Graziella Rossi and Pia Waibel, it has toured Europe and the United States concurrently with the film version, to rave reviews. The play is an elegant and powerful staging of Wust’s story, as recounted to author Erica Fischer in the 1994 best-selling book of the same name.
Wust finally told her story at the age of 80, after 50 years of agonizing silence. In1981 she was awarded the Federal Service Cross, one of West Germany’s highest service medals awarded to civilians, for hiding Felice and three other Jewish women during the war. When she first met Felice, she was the young wife of an SS soldier stationed at the front, the mother of four boys and winner of the Nazi party’s bronze Maternal Cross. Wust had once claimed to a friend that she could "smell a Jew", but was forced to confront her anti-semitism when she discovered her lover was a submarine – a Jew living underground. Felice was a dynamic and sensual young woman living in Berlin under an assumed name and working at a Nazi newspaper, feeding information to the resistance. The two lived happily together in Wust’s home until Felice was discovered by the Gestapo and deported to the Czechoslovakian ghetto of Theresienstadt. Wust risked her own life to try to get Felice released but failed.
The Glendon performances of the play will take place at 8 p.m. on Mar. 11 in English, and on Mar. 12 in German, at Glendon Theatre, Glendon College, 2275 Bayview Ave. (south of Lawrence). Tickets are $5 and only available at the door. The Glendon Gallery will open its doors prior to the performances for a special viewing of Still Life, an exhibition by Thelma Rosner that pays tribute to the experiences of two women who independently wrote cookbooks during their internment in Nazi concentration camps. Seeking a source of spiritual nourishment in the face of physical starvation, they recorded recipes of the food they had prepared in their homes before the war.
Glendon Theatre has mounted the production with the generous support of the Consulate General of Switzerland.
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For further information, please contact:
| Amaryah Rene | Susan Bigelow |
| Box Office Manager | Media Relations |
| Glendon Theatre, Glendon College | York University |
| York University | 416-736-2100, ext. 22091 |
| 416-487-6822 | sbigelow@yorku.ca |
YU/020/02
