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''The Soap Myth'' is a play by American playwright Jeff Cohen. The play had a workshop run in July 2009 at the ''Dog Run Repertory Company,'' and had an Off-Broadway run in the Spring of 2012 Off Broadway at The Roundabout Theater's Harold and Mimi Steinberg Theatre Center. That production was filmed and the film is being broadcast nationally on PBS. http://www.aptonline.org/catalog.nsf/vLinkTitle/SOAP+MYTH+THE ==Description== THE SOAP MYTH dramatizes the powerful confrontation between survivor memory and historical memory and depicts the insidiousness of Holocaust denial. More than a half century after World War II, at the desperate urging of a passionate survivor, a young investigative reporter finds herself caught between numerous versions of the same story and trying to separate fact from fiction. Did the Nazis make soap from the corpses of their murdered Jewish victims? Played out against the backdrop of deadline reporting and journalistic integrity, Jeff Cohen's critically acclaimed play The Soap Myth uses this horrific possibility as its catalyst. It questions who deserves the right to write history — those who have lived it and remember, those studying and protecting it, or those seeking to distort its very existence? And finally, what responsibility should others take once they know the truth? Although ''The Soap Myth'' is a work of fiction, it is, in the words of the program, "inspired by real people and real events as well as an article written by Josh Rolnick in ''Moment'' magazine profiling Holocaust survivor Morris Spitzer."〔Program, Dog Run Rep, South Street Seaport〕 Foremost among the play's historical inspirations is the evidence that the Nazi regime had a program at the Danzig Anatomic Institute in 1944 to develop a process for the mass-production of soap from the fat of Jews being slaughtered in Nazi extermination camps, and produced soap in small quantities at a nearby concentration camp. In a dramatic moment, the players re-enact testimony from the Nuremberg Trials, including this recipe: "5 kilos of human fat are mixed with 10 liters of water and 500 or 1,000 grams of caustic soda. All this is boiled 2 or 3 hours and then cooled. The soap floats to the surface while the water and other sediment remain at the bottom. A bit of salt and soda is added to this mixture. Then fresh water is added and the mixture again boiled 2 or 3 hours. After having cooled, the soap is poured into molds." The play's central character, is an elderly Holocaust survivor called Milton Saltzman, based on actual survivor named Morris Spitzer who worked doggedly to establish as fact the idea that the Nazis produced and used soap made from human corpses, even handing bars of such soap to Jews on their way into the sealed chambers that functioned alternately as gas chambers and as shower rooms in the Nazi concentration camps.〔(False Witness; A play examines the notion that Nazis made soap from Jewish flesh ), MARISSA BROSTOFF, July 21, 2009, ''Tablet Magazine''〕 The second character is a young journalist called Annie Blumberg assigned to write a story about Saltzman. She is soon caught between her sympathies for Saltzman and the adamant stand of a number of distinguished scholars of the Holocaust who refuse to publish the Nazi manufacture of soap as fact despite a large amount of eyewitness testimony, including the eyewitness testimony of both Nazis and British prisoners of war at the Nuremberg trial who worked in the experimental soap manufacturing facility at Danzig in 1944, because contemporary documentation is lacking. The scholars in the play fear that without proof beyond the eyewitness testimony, the story of the manufacture of soap from human bodies will become ammunition in the hands of Holocaust deniers.〔〔 Two characters representing historians of the Holocaust argue strongly that although a large number of eyewitnesses including former British POWs, Nazis, and Holocaust survivors have testified about the soap production, because no actual laboratory or production records survive as physical documents, any publication about the production of soap will be used by Holocaust deniers to discredit the reality of the Holocaust itself and, therefore, that no assertions that any soap production took place should be published.〔 A character called Brenda Goodsen, an amalgam of a number of Holocaust deniers including David Irving, appears in the play to demonstrate the evil of anti-Semitism in the form of Holocaust Denial. This character delivers a speech for minimizing the Holocaust and concluding that the Jews brought it on themselves. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「The Soap Myth」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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