Angel: A Nightmare in Two Acts …

About the Play …

Angel: A Nightmare in Two Acts uses the setting of the Holocaust to explore contemporary values, the question of personal responsibility versus universal guilt, and the seductive appeal of evil. Controversial and thought-provoking, Angel offers strong roles for women and strong subject matter for theaters seeking to challenge themselves and their audiences.

Irma Is Hung

Angel is a drama based on the trial and execution of real-life Nazi war criminal Irma Grese. Grese became a concentration camp guard at the age of sixteen, was prosecuted by the British in the Belsen trials, and was executed at the age of 21 for her crimes against humanity. A strikingly beautiful woman, she was dubbed by the international press as “The Blonde Angel of Auschwitz.”

Jewish Prosecutor Falls In Love

During the play, Irma’s prosecutor falls under her fatal charms. He is drawn, along with the audience, down into a private nightmare where the tables are turned and he becomes the accused.

Jewess Is Aghast

Also dragged into the nightmare is Olga Lengyel, a survivor of Auschwitz, who teaches the prosecutor a lesson about dignity and survival.
 

Right To The Gas Chambers

Auschwitz, was the largest of the Nazi German extermination camps, along with a number of concentration camps, comprising three main camps and 40 to 50 sub-camps. The name Auschwitz is the German name for the nearby town of Oświęcim, situated west of Kraków in southern Poland. Beginning in 1940, Nazi Germany built several concentration camps and an extermination camp in the area, which at the time was under German occupation. The Auschwitz camps were a major element in the perpetration of the Holocaust; at least 1.1 million people were killed there, of whom over 90% were Jews. The exact number of people killed in the camps is not known, but most modern estimates are around 1.1-1.6 million. About 700 prisoners attempted to escape from the Auschwitz camps during the years of their operation, with about 300 attempts successful.

Josef Mengele was a Nazi German military officer and physician who performed experiments that were condemned as murderously sadistic on prisoners in Auschwitz. He personally selected over 400,000 prisoners to die in gas chambers in Auschwitz.


On May 24, 1943 he became medical officer of Auschwitz-Birkenau. It was during his 21-month stay at Auschwitz that Mengele achieved infamy, and it is for this period that he was later referred to as the "Angel of Death". Mengele was usually part of the medical delegation which met incoming prisoners, determining which would be retained for work and experimentation, and which would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. Almost all of Mengele's experiments were of dubious scientific value, ignoring the lack of ethics involved, including various amputations and other brutal surgeries.

The Auschwitz Dwarfs

Subjects of Mengele's experiments were almost always killed afterward for dissection, if they survived the experiment itself. Mengele also had an interest in dwarfs, founding the Lilliput Troupe, seven of whose ten members were dwarfs. He often called them "his dwarf family" and experimented on them frequently. They seemed vital to his research and he had them treated specially — they were allowed to keep their clothes, scarves and accessories they had from their home. After the war Mengele escaped Germany and lived covertly abroad until his eventual accidental death in Brazil, which was later confirmed using DNA testing on his remains.

Irma Was A Killer And A Nymphomaniac

Irma Grese was the most notorious of the female Nazi war criminals. She rose to the rank of Senior SS-Supervisor in the autumn of 1943, in charge of around 30,000 women prisoners, mainly Polish and Hungarian Jews. This was the second highest rank that SS female concentration camp personnel could attain. After the war survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Irma Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. She habitually wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp's inmates and enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some of the women to death and whipped others mercilessly using a plaited whip. The inmates dubbed the blue-eyed blonde the "Beautiful Beast," while Grese herself became obsessed with the idea of becoming a film star after the war. She also had a reputation as a nymphomaniac, sexually abusing male and female prisoners alike and taking many lovers, including the camp physician Josef Mengele and camp commandant Josef Kramer.