Into the Woods: Bielski Partisans and Beyond

If you had asked me at the beginning of this holiday vacation what my plans were, I would have quickly said, "Rest, see family & friends, and watch Into the Woods."  I did all of that-- and read, and saw Big Eyes and The Imitation Game, and went to the Tenement Museum, and even did a wee little laundry. But Into the Woods became even more central to my vacation than I planned because it set me forth researching different meanings of the play and different people who had his out in the woods.

First, the musical has strong personal meanings to me. Back when I was graduating from college and struggling with depression (several worlds ago!), Sondheim's lyrics gave me hope. Though my friendships were changing, I found solace in his wisdom: "Sometimes people leave you halfway through the wood; do not let that grieve you, no one leaves for good." My world at the time was based in two beautiful communities that I felt had to be temporary. I had my college friendships in Pennsylvania, but they would all graduate and scurry on to life's next adventure. I also had my family in Long Island, but as long as I lived there, I knew I would be too shy to order pizza. Jack's song about returning from the Giant's house gave me the idea to move to New Jersey: "And you think of all of the things you've seen and you wish that you could live in between and you're back again but different than before...after the sky."  I made a home for myself in this magnificent inbetween world and I am grateful every day that I have come out of the woods of my early twenties!

There is always a little chatter on the Internet about Sondheim using fairy tales gone awry to represent the AIDS epidemic that was tormenting his Broadway community when this musical was in its creation stages (no pun intended) back in the 1980s. I can see where the metaphor comes from, with distinct groups of people ending up in a deadly forest as a result of their own  wishes and choices. Love brought a giant to the woods and caused so much destruction. I'm glad, though, so glad about Sondheim's insistence on not tying the musical to one particular time in history. Today, multiple websites quoted him as saying, "We never meant this to be specific. The trouble with fables is everyone looks for symbolism.”

After seeing the movie, I began to wonder if hiding in the woods helped anybody during the Holocaust. I thought I had heard someone speak about this at an event at Raritan Valley Community College a few years ago, but my mind was open to more research. This is how I ended up spending much of my vacation reading about the Bielski Partisans. 

In Belarus, three brothers saw the writing on the wall and escaped from a ghetto by digging under a barbed wire fence.  They camped out in the woods and created an "Otriad" group which lived in underground bunkers and saved 1200 Jewish peers in the heart of the Holocaust. One aspect of their system that I particularly admire is that, in pure upstander style, they would take in anyone who needed help-- old, young, male, female, handicapped or physically able. 

Of course, after the movie "Defiance" was made about this group, many people in Poland spoke out against honoring this group with too much reverence because of some violent means they used in order to survive, most notably in the Naliboki massacre.   I struggle a lot lately with what people have to do to survive. The musical, too, struggles with that.

I just read a recent account about Hidden Children from the Holocaust, too. The lyrics from Into the Woods spoke of some of the situations described in "Such Good Girls" by RD Rosen. Parents went to such extreme measures to save their children and then-- if lucky enough to survive-- childhoods were forgotten. Even Jewish identities were forgotten when children were hidden by pretending they were of other faiths. There are many ways to lose a child...

  

But in the end, be it me with my depression, Broadway and its many losses to AIDS, strangers saving one another in the woods or children hiding in attics or different identities--- Sondheim reminds us that No One Is Alone.

Sometimes I feel so alone. But I always have his songs to sing.