‘Blonde Poison’ tells terrible true tale of how Jewish woman survived WWII

“Blonde Poison,” opening Thursday at The Washington Center for the Performing Arts, tells the true story of a Jewish woman who betrayed hundreds or thousands of fellow Jews to the Nazis.

“It’s 90 minutes of intense emotion,” said Carol Adams of Vancouver, Washington, who plays Stella Goldschlag in the Northwest premiere of the one-woman show by Gail Louw of Sussex, England. “What she did was so reprehensible, and yet people walk out thinking, ‘I don’t know what I would have done.’ ”

A few weeks before it opened, the play already had people in South Sound talking.

“It’s a controversial, influential and explosive piece,” said Billy Thomas, the center’s marketing director. “It’s getting a lot of attention on Facebook and on the phones.”

Adams, who’ll perform the play twice at the center and present a shortened version at a few area schools, has played the role in four cities since 2015.

“Adams throws her heart and soul into portraying the self-loathing, anti-Semitic Goldschlag,” Matt Palm of the Orlando (Florida) Sentinel wrote of her 2016 performance there. “It’s a chilling performance.”

Jill Barnes, the Washington Center’s executive director, saw excerpts at presenters’ conferences a year ago.

“I was very moved by her performance, and the themes struck a chord with me, especially as national dialogue around refugees and immigration was picking up,” Barnes said in an email interview. “Unfortunately, the topic is still relevant.”

She said most of the comments on social media have been from people who haven’t seen the show but are troubled by the subject matter.

It is a difficult show. Goldschlag was herself betrayed to the Gestapo, and was beaten for carrying false identification. She was then given a chance to save herself and her parents — by betraying other Jews.

“At first, she was kind of faking her way and pretending,” Adams said. “Then it became obvious that if she didn’t do something, the Gestapo would know. … She was not the only person who did this, but she was one of the few who survived, because as soon as they sensed you were faking it, that you weren’t going out and finding people, you were useless to them and they shipped you off.”

As the war went on, Goldschlag came to relish her power over people’s lives.

“She was such a cruel, awful, dreadful, evil person, but you can’t help but understand where she is coming from,” playwright Louw, herself Jewish, said in an interview published on the play’s website. “If you were given the opportunity to save yourself and your beloved parents, people would take it. Then again, … a lot of people didn’t take it.”

Louw, who based the show largely on the book “Stella” by Peter Wyden, believes that Goldschlag hated her own Jewishness.

“Some families were extremely secular and hated the idea of being Jewish,” she said in the website interview. “It was Hitler who made them become Jewish. Suddenly, it was forced on them, and they had to wear yellow stars and have it define them.”

“It’s not as black and white as people would like to think,” Adams said. “Not that any of it is excusable, but it’s more gray than that.”

Adams has seen audiences come to understand that.

“I cannot tell you how many people have come to this show and they have their arms crossed and their faces set, and they are just ready to hate me, and by the time the show is over, you can see they have relaxed and are thinking,” she said.

“That is what good theater should do — it should make you think.”

This story was originally published January 19, 2018 at 4:09 AM with the headline "‘Blonde Poison’ tells terrible true tale of how Jewish woman survived WWII."