This story, told by Beth Paterson, is about her “nanna Niusia … and I remember her as a bitch”. It is quite the statement about her 86-year-old grandmother whom she was taken to visit as a teenager, when all she wanted to do was go to the movies. To Paterson, Niusia was an old curmudgeon full of complaints and cruelties.
But she proceeds to take us on the journey that she went on after Niusia’s death, when she became curious about who her Polish immigrant grandmother had been before settling in Melbourne.
It turns out that she had been Holocaust survivor, although, typically for one who had lived through its trauma, she rarely talked about the time “before”.
Under the direction of her collaborator Kat Yates, Paterson excavates her grandmother’s past, beginning with her successful businesses in Melbourne, which she singlehandedly built. But the drama then spools back to the beginning: her birth in Warsaw in 1922, her ambitions to become a doctor before her imprisonment in Auschwitz and, chillingly, the medical work she was forced to do under the Nazi eugenicist Josef Mengele.
Patterson’s attitude toward Niusia changes after the airing of these memories, sourced through her mother, whose voice we hear in recordings.
This is a surprisingly warm play given its theme of the Holocaust and inherited trauma. Paterson is a sweet, perky storyteller, singing at times and incorporating her play-making process into her narration. Sometimes this seems pertinent, other times unnecessary.
She brings some taboo-busting humour to the subject, which also only half works. It defuses the tension but sounds like random lines from an edgy standup routine.
There are life lessons for Paterson along the way, which she speaks aloud, recommending books that are in brown boxes and which she reaches for at various moments. It is clear that the disinterring of personal history is part of an education – one she now imparts to us.
The narrative strays from Niusia towards the end, on to Paterson’s Australian Jewish identity and the anxiety of not being seen as Jewish enough – which could make for a play of its own. It is ultimately Niusia’s story that grips. Paterson puts on an accent to bring her back to life. We hear that she went on to have twins after leaving the camp. As Paterson says, isn’t that the best “fuck you” to Mengele? Quite.
At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 25 August