In late 2019, Beth Paterson approached director Kat Yates with a few sketches of writing, a core concept and a dream, to take her Nana’s story to Edinburgh Fringe in 2025 for the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.
In July, Paterson will fulfill her dream.
“In early 2023 and after countless hours of work, we had what we thought was a full draft. It was replete with stories from Niusia’s life: anecdotes, vignettes, and scenes painting my memories of her,” Paterson told The AJN. “However there were so many moments that fell flat or didn’t feel right in my voice. After a table read we realised what we were missing: my mother’s voice. In both the literal and metaphorical sense. So, Kat and I approached my generous and remarkable mother and Susie agreed to sit down with us and take a recorded interview. From there the work bloomed and NIUSIA, as we know it, came to be.”
NIUSIA has just returned from the Adelaide Fringe Festival – the second-largest open-access theatre festival in the world – and will shortly embark on a tour of metropolitan and regional Victoria before departing for Edinburgh.
The production weaves together Paterson’s own story, her memories, recordings of her mother sharing her story and dramatised conjurings of Niusia in post-war Melbourne.
As Paterson told The AJN, Niusia was a remarkable woman. She was studying medicine when the war started and she was taken to Auschwitz. She still managed to use her medical training though, saving people’s lives by smuggling medication out from the hospital division where she was forced to work. Paterson explained that her mother only found this out when a woman bumped into Niusia some years later and acknowledged that Niusia saved her life.
“Niusia was also my beloved grandmother. She was a formidable woman who I sadly never had the chance to meet in full glorious flight. By the time I came along she was fairly unwell, forlorn and pointed – on a good day,” Paterson said, explaining that Niusia was magnetic, whip-crack clever and sometimes shockingly cruel.
“Audiences can expect to laugh loudly as I fumble through being maybe-sort-of-definitely Jewish, gasp in horror as I reckon with my nana’s history of working for Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, and cry, smile, and remember their own family stories…”
“Writing NIUSIA was initially a means for me to comprehend my Nana’s complex legacy: hero, survivor, and a grandmother I remember very bitterly,” she said. “My relationship with her memory transforms through the show and the audience journeys with me as I explore what it is to hold complex and often conflicting feelings about your Holocaust-surviving grandmother.”
Discovering and writing NIUSIA also helped Paterson figure out where she fits in the Jewish community.
Despite not thinking about her Jewishness when she began writing the production, through conversations with Yates, Paterson eventually figured out how to “tentatively” step into her Jewish heritage, and just how much her Judaism shaped her upbringing.
“While I didn’t grow up within the Jewish community or participating in holidays and such, there were still big chunks of my experience that contrasted starkly with Kat’s Lutheran upbringing,” Paterson recalled. “This happened more and more through the writing process, became a part of the show, and gradually led me to tentatively stepping into my Jewish heritage.”
Paterson told The AJN this changed her. She now participates in Jewish groups and learning classes and she’s a proud member of the Centre of Jewish Arts.
“It has become a source of great joy in my life. This show allowed me to glimpse the incredibly rich and long cultural history from which I emerge, and it has come to provide me with an unbelievable strength. I don’t exist in isolation,” she said.
Paterson recalled being inspired to delve into her heritage when she saw Merciless Gods, a story about intergenerational relationships in immigrant families, particularly Greek and Turkish. She recalled connecting with the stories – particularly the tense relationships between grandchildren and grandparents and the different worlds in which the generations lived.
“That show hit me like a ton of bricks and propelled me to think on where I came from and how I identify: Jewish? White? 2nd generation refugee? Privileged? Identities often placed at opposition with one another rolled around my head,” she said.
But she said, it was Patti Lupone belting out a Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien parody that ultimately drove her to put pen to paper.
“This show allowed me to glimpse the incredibly rich and long cultural history from which I emerge, and it has come to provide me with an unbelievable strength. I don’t exist in isolation.”
“This spoof, I Regret Everything, captured me. The laundry list of faux pas, the cherished woe, the drama of it all: everything about it screamed Nana. My mother and I laughed until we cried, then we cried until we laughed. Questions bubbled out of me until Mum tired and pushed me out of the house and into my car. I pressed for more stories down the front steps and up until the moment my car door had been (lovingly) slammed shut. I left that afternoon buzzing with stories and fuzzy memories,” she recalled. “Nana hasn’t left my head since.”
Paterson said audiences who see NIUSIA can expect to laugh, a lot, while also recalling their own family stories alongside the production.
“Audiences can expect to laugh loudly as I fumble through being maybe-sort-of-definitely Jewish, gasp in horror as I reckon with my nana’s history of working for Josef Mengele in Auschwitz, and cry, smile, and remember their own family stories,” she said. “NIUSIA is an exploration of the diasporic experience, and brings to life the sometimes-grim, sometimes-hilarious experience of being the grandchild of a ball-busting matriarch. It is a love letter to family and a poignant illustration of the special, if not sometimes-difficult relationships that exist between grandmother-mother-granddaughter, and the impact of trauma on these relationships.”
NIUSIA is showing at The Round on May 2 and 3, at Kingston Arts Centre on May 16 and 17 and throughout Regional Victoria in May and October.
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