This story is part of “The Last Survivors,” originally published Jan. 8, 2016.
London-based Posner, an 82-year-old Polish survivor who arrived in the U.K. after the war and went on to become a member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, escaped the Warsaw Ghetto with her aunt at the age of 9 with falsified passports. (Her nonobservant parents subsequently were murdered at the Treblinka extermination camp.) “Now when I talk about it, it seems like I’m describing my role in a play,” she says of the day on a march to a public bathhouse in the center of town when they casually walked from the Jewish to the Aryan sides of the street without being seen by SS patrolmen. There, they shed their yellow-starred armbands and disappeared into their new identities — in her case, as Irena Slabowska (a name her aunt picked). “Years later, when I became an actress, I was told that was my best performance because I had to remember my text, I had to remember who I was, and I had to actually act as another person.”
During her three years on the run, she continued to inhabit the role: pretending to suffer from tuberculosis as an alibi for seeking shelter in a peasant’s countryside cottage and kneeling bedside at night while reciting the Lord’s Prayer verbatim like a good Catholic girl. “It was how we survived.”
Once she settled in England, attending the London College of Dance and Drama, she kept quiet about her Holocaust experience for years. “I didn’t want to be a victim, and I didn’t want to tell anyone because I was afraid they wouldn’t believe me,” says Posner, who didn’t even discuss it with her British husband, Michael, whom she married in 1950. “It was too dramatic.”
Her thinking evolved in the early 1990s, around the time she starred in the German touring run of British playwright Julia Pascal’s acclaimed Theresa, based on a true story about a Jewish woman betrayed by Nazi collaborators during the war. In Frankfurt, a newspaper story noted that the father of the actor who played her son had been a Nazi. “After the performance, people were throwing flowers,” remembers Posner. “They were just so moved by the fact that there were the two of us, holding hands. I have never in my life and never will again have such a reception.”
That moment indeed might have been a high-water mark. The pronounced rise in recent years of European anti-Semitism has, she explains, given her yet “a renewed impetus not only to talk about [her experience] but to scream about it. My whole life was changed. I lost everyone.”
