The History Behind Eight Nights

The poster for DPT’s production of Eight Nights, a play by Jennifer Maisel, which runs from September 27 to November 5, 2023.

 

Eight Nights by Jennifer Maisel contains many references to historical events, from the 1939 voyage of the St. Louis to Donald Trump’s “Muslim Ban” in January 2017. Some of this you’ve probably learned about in school or lived through yourself; some of it, you may have never heard of. On this page, you can find information that will help contextualize what you see onstage, and you can also access resources that will help you continue to learn even after you leave the theater! Links to external sources are in orange text.

Note: While no explicit or violent images will be shown, please be aware that the information on this page may be distressing to read.

 

The Holocaust


The Holocaust, or the Shoah (Hebrew for “catastrophe”), refers to the mass genocide of Jewish people conducted by Nazi Germany between 1941 and 1945.

Concentration Camps & Killing Centers

The entrance gate to the Auschwitz killing center, with the German slogan “Arbeit Macht Frei,” meaning “Work will set you free,” written at the top. Photo from May 1945.

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, the Nazi regime forced Jewish people, Polish people, Romani people, political prisoners, homosexuals, and any other “undesirables” into concentration camps & then killing centers. One of the largest and most infamous of the centers, Auschwitz, murdered nearly 1,000,000 people—most of them Jewish. Overall, approximately 6 million Jewish people—2/3rds of the European Jewish population—were killed by the Nazis during the period between 1941–1945.

The concentration camps were liberated by Allied troops between 1944 and 1945, with Auschwitz being liberated by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, and U.S. troops liberating Dachau April 29, 1945. Among the troops that liberated Dachau were Black troops from one of the segregated, all-Black units within the U.S. Army as well as troops from the 522nd Field Artillery Battalion, which was part of the segregated, all-Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team. Learn more about liberation here. Learn more about the poor treatment of Black American troops here. Learn more about the 442nd Regimental Combat Team—the most decorated unit in U.S. military history—here.

Post-War Displaced Persons Camps

Jewish DPs receiving their bread rations while living in the Bindermichl displaced persons’ camp. Photo taken sometime after 1946.

Following the end of WWII, there were approximately 11 million displaced persons (DPs) in Europe, 8 million of whom were in Germany. Most returned to their home countries during 1945, but by September of that year, 1.2 million DPs were still in Germany and would not willingly return to their home states. This caused a massive refugee crisis. Displaced persons’ camps were a solution: Roosevelt, Churchill, and Stalin established these camps during the 1945 Yalta Conference as places where the remaining DPs could live while personal repatriation and immigration were sorted out.

In the play, Rebecca mentions Föhrenwald. This was a displaced persons camp established in 1945 in the American-occupied region of Germany south of Munich. Föhrenwald was the third largest of the DP camps, and it was one of the nicer ones; homes were small but solid, and had central heating. It functioned very much like a town of its own with institutions like schools, a police force, youth home, and fire brigade. In 1945 the camp housed about 4000 people, and it had a high birth rate: within the first 15 months of the camp’s existence, 200 women were pregnant. As a whole, Föhrenwald became a major voice for refugees. The camp was originally supposed to close in 1949, but it  remained open until 1957 because of the number of DPs who were unable to emigrate.

 

The Voyage of the St. Louis

Passengers of the St. Louis boarding the ship in Hamburg, Germany in 1939.

The St. Louis was a German ocean liner that sailed from Hamburg to Havana, Cuba in 1939 carrying mostly Jewish refugees fleeing the Nazi regime. Cuba refused to allow the ship to land, and the U.S. and Canada also turned the ship away. The St. Louis was forced to return to Europe, and while many passengers were able to obtain visas in several Western European countries, 254 of the ship’s 937 passengers (27%) would perish in the camps.  

If you’d like to learn more, click here to read the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum’s article about the ship & its passengers. You can also access the St. Louis collection run by the USHMM here to see oral histories, family documents, photos, and other historical materials related to the voyage.

Japanese-American Incarceration

People wait in line for their housing assignment at the Manzanar concentration camp in the California desert in 1942. More than 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry were removed from their homes and placed in camps in several states during World War II. AP

In February 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, citing military necessity* as the basis for incarcerating over 120,000 Japanese Americans on the West Coast during World War II, months after the Japanese Empire’s bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. Many Japanese American inmates permanently lost all of their property and livelihoods with many given mere days to make preparations for the evacuation. 

These Japanese American men, women and children were exiled to euphemistically called “assembly centers,” often on racetracks or fairgrounds, and in some instances sleeping in recently vacated horse stalls. After a short period ranging from a few weeks to a few months, the inmates were sent to concentration camps in undesirable interior areas throughout the West and in Arkansas. These camps were made up of cramped (and often incomplete) army-style barracks in desolate deserts and flooded swamplands. Within the camps, the inmates were surrounded by barbed wire, armed guards, and guard towers. The barracks were not well-insulated from heat or cold, and there was very little privacy. Over time, schools, recreational activities, and even elections for “self-government” were established, but the guards remained and the reality of imprisonment was lost on few. Read more about the psychological effects of the camps on those incarcerated here.

In the early months of 1943, an ill-conceived “Loyalty Questionnaire” was forced upon the inmates in an effort to separate the “loyal” from the “disloyal.” On the basis of answers to two key questions, the former were deemed eligible to either enlist in the army (most joining the famed, segregated Japanese American 442nd Regimental Combat Team) or to leave the concentration camps to “resettle” in areas away from the West Coast, while the latter were segregated at the Tule Lake, California concentration camp (and were referred to as “No No Boys,” after their answers on the questionnaire).

When the last camp closed in 1946, the government evicted the primarily elderly and the destitute who remained, giving them $25 and a bus or train ticket. Many chose to return to the West Coast, where they encountered situations even more difficult than life in camp.

*Decades later, a congressional commission found President’s Roosevelt justification to be false, culminating in the passage of the Civil Liberties Act of 1988 on August 10th, 1988, providing a presidential apology, $20,000 payments to surviving former detainees, and a $1.25 billion education fund. While it’s not possible to make an accurate calculation of the value of lost property and potential income by the inmates (some estimates range from the millions to many billions of dollars), a total of 82,219 received redress. Read more about the redress movement here.

 

The Civil Rights Movement in America

A young woman holding a banner at the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. August 28, 1963.

The Civil Rights Movement was a widespread social movement during the 1950s and ‘60s aimed at attaining equal rights for Black Americans. WWII sparked greater discourse about racial inequalities in the U.S. because of the segregation and discrimination between units in the military, and about 10 years following the end of the war, the movement gained momentum as Black Americans increasingly pushed back against segregation and racist voting laws. Much of the movement was conducted through nonviolent protests, but racist retaliations against peaceful protesters by the police and white mobs were often violent and/or deadly. Despite the opposition, the movement succeeded in gaining a great deal of ground in legislative terms for the rights of Black Americans, particularly with the signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the Voting Rights Act of 1965, and the Fair Housing Act of 1968, among others.

The Black Power Movement also arose during the latter half of the 1960s out of frustrations with the mainstream Civil Rights Movement’s adherence to pacificity and refusal to challenge larger power structures that disenfranchised Black Americans. This movement focused more on the protection of Black lives from racist institutions like the police as well as the establishment of Black economic, political, and social self-sufficiency. The Black Panther Party and the League of Revolutionary Black Workers arose from this movement. Learn more about the Black Power Movement here and here. Purchase the award-winning play Detroit ‘67, written by DPT’s own Dominique Morisseau, here to dive deeper into the Detroit Uprising of 1967.

 

The Womens’ Liberation Movement

Womens’ liberation march from Farragut Square to Lafayette Park in Washington, D.C. August 26, 1970.

The Women’s Rights & Liberation Movements of the 1960s and ‘70s were movements that coincided with second-wave feminism, which focused on women’s rights in all aspects of society rather than solely the right to vote. These were also spurred on by WWII, since women had had to pick up jobs that had previously only been accessible to men when the men had gone to fight in Europe or the Pacific; however, their legal rights had remained the same when the men returned from the war. The movement was divided politically, with members of NOW (the National Organization for Women) pushing for less radical reform through legal channels—the Women’s Rights Movement—while further left-leaning feminists practiced more disruptive tactics in order to push for more substantial change in not only employment, education, and childcare law, but also in abortion law and domestic violence prevention—the Women’s Liberation Movement. Nevertheless, both achieved significant successes in the area of anti-discrimination, divorce, and abortion laws (e.g. Title IX and Roe v. Wade were of this era). Learn more about the Women’s Rights & Liberation Movements here.

 

The Syrian Civil War & Refugee Crisis

Syrian and Iraqi refugees arrive at Lesbos, Greece on a boat from Turkey. Volunteers from Proactiva Open Arms, a Spanish NGO, help them. October 30, 2015.

The Syrian Civil War is an ongoing civil conflict between the Syrian government and a collection of different belligerents, such as the pro-democracy Syrian Interim Government, the Sunni militia-backed Syrian Salvation Government, and numerous Salafi Jihadist organizations. It began following demonstrations during the Arab Spring in 2011 when the government cracked down violently on the protesters rallying for democratic government. In the past 12 years, somewhere around 600,000 people have been killed and more than 13 million (over half of the country’s population) have been displaced, leading to a massive refugee crisis. 

6.6 million refugees have been externally displaced, moving into humanitarian agency/UN-maintained refugee camps in neighboring countries such as Turkey, Jordan, Lebanon, and Egypt or seeking asylum elsewhere. Those who are repatriated often face forced disappearance or extrajudicial execution by the Syrian government. Around 16,000 refugees have been resettled in the U.S.; this is a rather low number compared to European countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, which have resettled 780k, 172k, and 87k refugees respectively. Learn more about the refugee crisis here.

In the play, Joram arrives on December 31, 2016 after fleeing Aleppo. This would have been right after the Syrian government had just recaptured the city and ended the four-year battle that had taken place there. In the U.S., the Obama Administration had accepted 3,566 Syrian refugees between October and December 2016 as part of their goal to resettle 110,000 refugees in addition to the 12,500+ already resettled in the country. On January 27, 2017, though, Donald Trump would sign an order to suspend any resettlement of Syrian refugees excepting those who were a religious minority—meaning all Muslims, the vast majority of the refugees, were banned. Learn about Syrian refugee integration in the U.S. pre-2017 here. Learn more about the refugee/immigration ban here.

 

Further Resources