False Papers

Operating under the theory that one needed to be seen in order not to be noticed, the Jewish Mendelsohn family became not just ordinary Polish Catholics, but the Zamojskis, a Polish family of noble lineage. Through sheer chutzpah and bravado, Robert Melson's mother acquired false identity papers that would disguise herself and her family, and allow them to survive the Holocaust. Robert Melson is the current president of the International Association of Genocide Scholars. He is a professor of political science at Purdue University, Indiana, and the author of the award-winning Revolution and Genocide: On the Origins of the Armenian Genocide and the Holocaust. Michael Berenbaum, former president of the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation, is co-producer of the Academy Award-winning documentary One Survivor Remembers: The Gerda Weissman Klein Story and the author of Witness to the Holocaust and other books.* A unique, candid, sometimes funny, often frightening tale of sheer bravado and chutzpah--a dangerous play impeccably performed in the open on the Nazi stage by a courageous Jewish family.