By Isha Malhotra, Havyn Basconcillo, Kaitlyn Ngo
Students filed into the silent auditorium and took their seats, waiting patiently for the performance to begin. And as the lights dimmed, all attention was pointed towards the stage.
There stood none other than Victor Talmadge, ready to step into the role of the million different voices that were lost during the cruelty of the Holocaust. Under the stage lights, he enthralled his audience through a rendition of these horrors, screaming and pleading with the true fear and anxiety in his personas.
All across the audience, students envisioned these scenes in awe, some even closing their eyes and clutching their shirts tightly; it was a truly gut wrenching performance.
Earlier this year, on February 24th and 26th, The Mitzvah Project, a nonprofit organization focused on ending Holocaust ignorance, presented two shows at James Logan High School. Over nine hundred sophomores got to watch this performance around the time they were learning about the Holocaust in their world history classes.
While we learn an accurate picture of the Holocaust through our history classes, many other schools and states don’t have this same kind of curriculum. As a result, the understanding of the Holocaust across America is distorted. This is the problem The Mitzvah Project looks to resolve – that of Holocaust education not accurately reflecting it.
The Holocaust is a story of hate against a group of people, and it has a theme that has resonated throughout history. Yet if we don’t understand what happened in the Holocaust, we will not be able to stop that same kind of hatred from eroding our world today.
Written by Roger Grunwald and performed by a series of teaching artists (like Victor Talmadge!), The Mitzvah Project is an hour-long program divided into three segments: a one artist play, a historical slideshow, and a question and answer session with the teaching artist. Since 2016, they have toured 216 schools and organizations around the globe.
For the first twenty minutes, the teaching artist acts out the story of a half-Jewish Wehrmacht officer, a half-Jewish German Auschwitz survivor, and a Groucho Marx-esque narrator, all of whom the artist switches between with a slight change in costume. It explores themes of prejudice, justice, and the reality of the Holocaust. This performance has been extended into a full length play named I Died in Auschwitz, which is expected to run in January 2027 at the Marin Shakespeare Company in San Francisco.
After the performance aspect, the teaching artist presents a slideshow about the actual history of the Holocaust, including art and other mediums to illustrate the impact. The teaching artist, then, shares his family’s experience with the Holocaust before opening the floor to student questions; for Mr. Talmadge, he shared his own connections, his father’s story.
As per what Logan students thought of this show, many Victor Talmadge, during the Logan show of them expressed their praise.
Santino Bayuga (10) raves, “It was really good. [Mr. Talmadge’s] acting…[was] very good. I like how he was able to…portray different characters.”
Mrs. Farmer, AP World History and World History teacher, expressed her excitement as well. “I think it’s really powerful to have a live artistic expression and show…I was eager to learn what [this] performance was.”
Not only impressed with Talmadge’s powerful performance in such a limited space, she added, “As a history teacher, I really gravitated towards the explanations too.”
Many students also resonated with the themes of the performance. Angela Win (10) says she learnt that “we have to be a little bit more empathetic [towards other people]” because of this show.
However, it wasn’t easy getting The Mitzvah Project to James Logan High School.
Mr. Isenberg, AP World History teacher and the main point of contact between the school and the organization, recounted what led him to initiate this undertaking.
“I saw a newspaper article about [The Mitzvah Project] when they were at a different school in the Bay last year…We started talking to [Roger Grunwald about bringing the show to Logan] in like April or May of last year,” he said.
Scheduling this performance around the time when the world history classes were learning about the Holocaust was a hard task in itself, but trying to coordinate being able to share this performance with such a large number of students only added to the magnitude of the task.
“Logistically, in a school of this size, trying to get, you know, 900 sophomores into one performance [is] tricky…But I think it’s worth it …It breaks up the learning a little bit,” Isenberg said.
Because of how arduous the process was to coordinate this event, it is unlikely we will see The Mitzvah Project at Logan in the 2026-27 school year, but it may be back in future years because of the positive response to it.
After the show, we were lucky enough to get a chance to interview Mr. Grunwald and Mr. Talmadge about their thoughts on the show and the cause.
The Holocaust is one of the most widely misconstrued events in history. For a variety of reasons, people look past the Holocaust – denying its existence, impact, or “revising” it entirely.
This is what inspired Roger Grunwald to write The Mitzvah Project. For his and millions of other families, the Holocaust was anything but a hoax.
Mr. Grunwald explained, “I am the son of a Holocaust survivor. My mom survived Auschwitz [and] her sister… survived Bergen Belsen.” The Holocaust is something that affects Mr. Grunwald’s family personally, so seeing ignorance around it is demeaning for him.
After training at the London Academy of Music and Dramatic Art, Grunwald knew he wanted to create something out of his family history. Especially since there was no work surrounding the nature of being half German and half Jewish, Grunwald found inspiration for his play there.
It is hard to express the horrors of the Holocaust in words. That is where Mr. Grunwald believes theatre has an advantage, “And that’s one of the things that theater can do – it can help people see.”
“For example, when [the character] Schmoil, arrived on the platform at Auschwitz,…he fell on his knees and was begging this imaginary SS man. ‘Wait, wait, my hands! I’m good with my hands! Wood, metal, I fix things!’”
It is scenes like this that are meant to remind the audience that there were human beings affected by the Holocaust, that this might have actually happened to someone. And we can’t let it happen again.
Both Mr. Talmadge and Mr. Grunwald agree that being able to connect with students in the audience after the performance is their favorite part of this project.
“I think when people…get to…share their personal stories [with me] [is] really probably the most rewarding part of the whole process,” Mr. Talmadge says.
On sharing this story, Mr. Talmadge explains, “Part of the reason that I want to make sure that Victor Talmadge, and Elijah Alexander and Rolf Saxon are teaching artists [are] going to high schools, is that young people need to learn these critical lessons of history…The othering of people…is a very pernicious aspect of hate.”
Roger Grunwald and Victor Talmadge (left to right)
Mr. Isenberg remarked, “The story of the Holocaust is really a group being persecuted by other groups… [and] that’s…unfortunately…always probably gonna be happening.”
“We feel it’s really incumbent upon us…to take it as far and wide as we can into schools…[We need these] tools to to understand, again, what these lessons of history are and why we have to… [accept] people of different races, of different ethnicities, of different religions,” Mr. Grunwald adds.
Mr. Talmadge echoed, “It’s part of the mission of The Mitzvah Project is to tell these stories so that these tragedies and atrocities don’t happen again… [It’s] an uphill battle, but it’s a good fight.”
And for our communities, our democracies, our future, there are a few lessons we need to take away.
Mr. Grunwald begins, “There is no other. The other is all of us.”
Mr. Talamdge encapsulates the importance of art as resistance. “All we can do as storytellers is tell these stories…Whether we have the power to convince people is another issue.”
“There’s a very famous poem that also addresses [this idea].” Mrs. Farmer advises everyone, “Be an upstander, [and] where there are possibilities to have positive impacts…start with showing up.”
It would be impossible to eliminate hatred in one day, but “as long as it’s not doing nothing. If everybody does something, it will change our world,” Mr. Grunwald ends.
Mr. Isenberg urges, “Be more aware of…injustices going on in the world. Be more active…Be responsible “There’s a very famous poem…” and civic minded citizens.”
The Holocaust is a story of the consequences of hate, but that same hate is something that unfairly persists even today.
We can’t divide ourselves over superficial categories, because we will lose sight of everything we do have in common.
We need to care, because it is everyone, people like you and me, who are or will be at stake here eventually.
We know the lessons of history, so we cannot let it repeat itself.
And Mr. Isenberg puts it best. Because at the end of the day,
“History is not just a collection of facts. It’s the human experience.”
Thank you to The Mitzvah Project, Roger Grunwald, Victor Talmadge, Mrs. Farmer, Mr. Isenberg, Alan from the PAC, Timothy Tran for photos, and everyone else who made this event possible. And to everyone reading this, thank you, and I hope you too never stop fighting for what is right.
