Professor David Peimer and Joanna Millan
An Interview with Holocaust Survivor Joanna Millan

David Peimer is a professor of theatre and performance studies in the UK. He has taught at the University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, and New York University (Global Division), and was a Fulbright Scholar at Columbia University. Born in South Africa, David has won numerous awards for playwriting and directing. He has written eleven plays and directed forty in places like South Africa, New York, Brussels, London, Berlin, Zulu Kingdom, Athens, and more. His writing has been published widely and he is the editor of Armed Response: Plays from South Africa (2009) and the interactive digital book Theatre in the Camps (2012). He is on the board of the Pinter Centre in London.

Joanna Millan was born Bela Rosenthal in Berlin in 1942. When she was 8 months old, she and her mother were deported to Theresienstadt. Her mother died of typhus, leaving Joanna on her own until she was liberated and brought to the UK. Adopted at the age of six, Joanna was told to forget the past. Hers is a story of reconstructed memory. For the past 30 years Joanna has been telling her story in schools and universities both in the UK and abroad, particularly in China.