The Gift of Happy Memories: A World War II Christmas Puppet Play in Ravensbrück

Szopki, Polish musical nativity puppet plays, were a widespread but relatively unstudied artistic response to Nazi occupation among Polish Catholics in Nazi concentration camps. As the nativity story is only a small portion of a szopka production, the Polish inmates had opportunities to subvert censorship during the rest of the performance. The artist Maja Berezowska and the actress Jadwiga Kopijowska wrote and performed Szopka Polska in the Ravensbrück concentration camp in 1942, 1943, and 1944. This article examines the adaptation of traditional carols and puppets in the context of social ritual to facilitate a purposeful recreation of happy and comforting prewar memories in the play. Building on scholarship that focuses on less visible forms and sites of resistance, the present article’s approach frames the sharing of positive memories as a form of caretaking. These activities, especially communal activities led by women, are often overlooked in scholarship in favor of more overt or dramatic actions. The Szopka Polska writers drew strength from representations of childhood and motherhood. Parodied traditional songs and altered stock szopki scenes promoted Polish heritage and normalcy, using Poland’s past triumphs as hope for future liberation. Three modern puppets, the Soldier, Polish Mother, and a Häftling (inmate), attend the nativity and directly address the inmates’ World War II experiences, a phenomenon that rarely occurred in other forms of concentration camp theater. In the play, these three puppets, the 19th-century folk character Wiarus, and a skit for two children promote survival and resistance by modeling productive reactions to oppression.


Introduction
In the Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück, where the Nazis almost exclusively interned women, Polish political prisoners organized Christmas activities for the women and children in their barracks (Wińska, 2006: 113-14). They marked the holiday by singing carols, exchanging small handmade gifts, and performing a szopka (plural, szopki). Denoting a musical Polish puppet play centered on the birth of Christ, the term szopka encompasses both the Nativity play and the folk art of colorful sets where plays are performed. Szopki are performed during the Christmas season and function as a social ritual with inverted world themes and social commentary. Interned actress Jadwiga Kopijowska (1910Kopijowska ( -2000 and artist Maja Berezowska    1942, 1943, and 1944. 1 Both women were a vital part of the cultural life in Ravensbrück: they led regular discussions on art and literature, and organized poetry readings and singing activities (Jaiser, 2000: 36). Kopijowska was a theater actress in the 1930s, and she participated in a puppet theater company under the Robotnicze Towarzystwo Przyjaciół Dzieci [Workers' Society of Friends to Children] in Warsaw. She may have adapted those prewar plays for her camp production. After the Nazi occupation in 1939, Kopijowska participated in the resistance efforts led by the Związek Walki Zbrojnej [Union of Armed Struggle], a Polish underground army. She was arrested in the spring of 1941, when she gave the fake name Szałanka that she used in the camp, and was interrogated in Pawiak prison before her internment to Ravensbrück (Czyńska, 2018: 117). Kopijowska became a journalist after the war. Berezowska was interned in 1942 as retaliation for her racy caricatures mocking Hitler, published in 1934 in ICI Paris when she lived in the French capital (Nowakowska-Sito, 2013: 27). Berezowska reported that Kopijowska saved her life several times by hiding the women who could not work in their barrack's attic during searches (Czyńska, 2018: 117). Berezowska continued her work as an illustrator after the war.
The Nazi concentration camp Ravensbrück was located near Berlin. It operated from 1939 until its liberation by Soviet forces in 1945. Intended initially to consolidate the Third Reich's female political prisoners, women from occupied territories were sent there as the war progressed (Saidel, 2009). The inmate population was primarily 1 Berezowska's biographer Małgorzata Czyńska (2018) collected valuable resources, such as Berezowska's postwar report on the camp to the Red Cross, a few quotes from published interviews regarding her Ravensbrück experience, and interviews with the performers' surviving relatives. General information on Ravensbrück from postwar recollections, including inmates' Christmas activities, were gathered in Polish-language monographs on the camp by survivors Urszula Wińska (2006) and Wanda Kiedrzyńska (1965). female, but some of the women were interned with their children, and there were a few hundred men in satellite work camps. According to Bernhard Strebel, the estimated number of inmates incarcerated was 123,000 people, and over 40,000 Polish women were interned as political prisoners. While Jewish inmates who were interned at Ravensbrück also strived to maintain a small part of their cultural lives, this article focuses on the cultural activities of Polish political prisoners and their Catholic Christmas observances. Though categorized as a labor camp, there was a high fatality rate; the Schutzstaffel (SS) used the inmates for medical experiments and slave labor for factory work. The inmates were forced to work in poor conditions until death, and limited resources exacerbated the death rate (Strebel, 2009(Strebel, : 1190.
Ravensbrück's Polish political prisoners participated in a mix of permitted and clandestine cultural activities, such as creating artwork, organizing poetry readings, and performing small plays. Szopki blend Catholicism with folklore and secular culture, featuring additional scenes unrelated to the Nativity. The plays are associated with the Polish caroling tradition and, beginning in 1937, the annual szopka set competition in Kraków. The fanciful multi-tiered Cracovian szopki sets only emerged at the end of the 19th century; historically, the sets were fashioned after barns or caves. The plays performed in these structures have a long tradition; this article focuses on szopki as a theater tradition with regional variants, not on the Cracovian sets.
The development of modern szopki was not linear and was influenced by Polish artistic movements and other forms of theater in Europe, such as French cabaret and satirical Varsovian Yiddish theater. Szopki stem from the mystery plays popular in Europe in the Late Middle Ages, and other Eastern European puppet play traditions, such as the Ukrainian vertep, a mobile puppet show. While early szopki dramatized the Nativity scene in churches, the Polish clergy expelled the plays in the mid-18th century due to increasingly secular and satirical additions. 2 Nativity plays that remained faithful to the biblical narrative are historically referred to as jaselki (singular jaselka). Freed from the restraints of liturgical accuracy, szopka writers placed Polish life on stage, transplanting the manger from Bethlehem to the Tatra mountains in Poland, with Polish shepherds, locals, and folklore characters paying homage to the Christ Child. By the end of the 19th century, the plays existed in three traditions: domestic productions in homes or for caroling, public spectacles, and professional works in exclusive spaces such as parties and salons. The puppets ranged from small rod puppets with inert limbs in simple sets to marionettes in elaborate tiered stages.
2 L R Lewitter (1950) gathered documentation on szopki, including descriptions of portable sets for carolers in the 17th century and accounts such as Jędrzej Kitowicz's (1728Kitowicz's ( -1804 description of an 'undignified' Nativity play that was barred by a Bishop from dioceses in Poznań (Lewitter, 1950: 79).

Satirical New
Year's szopki, which abandon the manger scene, are still included in the genre as they are performed during the Christmas season and retain the ritual function in society.
To an audience not immersed in the genre's traditions, the puppets in a szopka, and the selection of kolędy [Polish carols] (singular kolęda) they sing, seem innocuous.
However, since the 17th century, Poles have used cultural associations embedded in kolędy and the deceptively lowbrow puppet plays to voice dissent, satirically address community concerns, and strengthen a sense of national identity. While the plays have received scant scholarly attention, szopki were a widespread artistic and ritualistic response to Nazi occupation among Polish Catholics. Only a few manuscripts survived, but fragments, artistic renditions, and survivors' accounts of the performances contribute to the overall picture of wartime szopki practices. Wiarus. Aural and visual references to shared experiences, heritage, and knowledge served as coded signifiers to create a private Polish space in the camp, providing the inmates with a rare opportunity to communicate subversive ideas. As the creators designed the play for a relatively small audience who shared specific cultural codes and experiences of war and internment, some references and allusions remain opaque to readers today. Still, the present study's analysis reveals that the comforting and painful cultural memories in Szopka Polska could be tools of transformation in the liminal space of a szopka performance, with a lasting impact on the participants after they sang the final carol.

Sources and Broader Scholarship
This article is the first in-depth analysis of the unpublished Szopka Polska (1942) manuscript, the accompanying skit (1944) and watercolor renditions of the puppets, dated 1942. It is part of a broader study that approaches szopki performed across the camp network as social rituals, rather than divertissement. While the location of Berezowska's original watercolors is unknown, a copy of the documents is located in the Aleksander Kulisiewicz collection in the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum archives (USHMM). Kulisiewicz (1918-82) was interned in the Sachsenhausen concentration camp, and, after the war, he assembled an invaluable collection of documentation on cultural life in the camps.
There is no record of the audience's reaction or the number of children in the audience, only postwar accounts of the play in the descriptions of Christmas activities (Wińska, 2006: 113-14). Due to our knowledge of camp conditions-death, deportation to other camps, and the growing inmate population-we can extrapolate that many attendees would have changed year-to-year. Performance details are provided by information accompanying the archival files housed at the National Library in Warsaw, Ravensbrück Memorial Archive, and the USHMM. Krystyna Szczepanek made the stick puppets according to Berezowska's designs. Kopijowska directed the production and voiced some of the puppets. The other parts were voiced by Wanda Dreszerowa, Wacka Wójcik, Jadwiga Ujazdowska, and Maria Kuleczko. The surviving manuscript for this play does not include musical scores as this practice does not necessarily require scores or instrumental accompaniment. However, there is a part for Iza Sicińska's choir, meant to be sung offstage. In szopka performance practice, depending on the number of characters in a scene, only one to four performers move and voice the puppets.
Mnemonic techniques were used across camp demographics to commit new poems and lyrics to memory by singing new words to a popular tune (Gilbert, 2005: 124). However, when writing the Szopka Polska, Kopijowska considered each tune's original lyrics and historical associations, rather than a song's popularity. The present analysis, complemented by the surviving visuals of the puppets, considers the songs' existing cultural associations and social functions in addition to how Kopijowska arranged, shortened, and altered some lyrics. The manuscript indicates some song titles, but a few songs could only be identified through painstaking extrapolation from the altered lyrics or lyric fragments.
The lack of scholarship on this play is further complicated by the uneven representation of World War II music and theater in musicology, partially due to difficulties in accessing former camps and archives located in territories under the postwar control of the Soviet Union. Furthermore, camp cultural activities are difficult to compare due to wide variations in content and intended functions. Most of the musical and theatrical works revived for audiences today were open to a broad crosssection of the camp population and rarely reflected the experiences of any specific group, making these productions more accessible for contemporary audiences lacking in-depth knowledge of the widely varied and complex prisoner cultures present in  (Beckerman and Tadmor, 2016)-these works are still accessible to audiences beyond the camp itself as they borrow material from the musical canon rather than regional traditions.
Shirli Gilbert (2004) challenges the pervasive postwar narrative that cultural activities initiated by camp inmates were keys to survival, demonstrating that inmates had both positive and negative experiences with music and theater. She examines thematic variations in songs sung or written by various prisoner nationalities and the role of identity formation that singing held before the war, revealing a complex relationship between music and memory. German political prisoners in the Sachsenhausen camp promoted solidarity by singing prewar songs affiliated with their political movements or workers' societies (Gilbert, 2004: 291-3). By contrast, Polish political prisoners wrote and sang melancholy songs that detailed their traumatic experiences. While inmates from other nationalities were disturbed by their macabre and bleak lyrics, Gilbert recognizes that the Polish songs met that community's needs as a medium for testimony and provided the community with a way to process trauma ( Poles, in Russian-controlled territory, could indirectly mock their occupiers by using puppets that resembled Austrians or older enemies, such as the Ottoman invaders (Segel, 2002: 76-7). The audience in Ravensbrück could engage in passive resistance by making the same 'mental transitions' through allusions to historical events.
The censorship protocols across the Ravensbrück camp network dictated that scripts required advanced approval by the guards or the Kapos (inmate functionaries who supervised other prisoners in exchange for certain privileges). Nazi policy toward ethnic Poles primarily targeted well-educated and influential members of society for deportation and murder to gain swift control of Polish territory (Stibbe, 2012: 166). The writers of Szopka Polska were careful not to include material that mentioned guards, Reich officials, or overt references to the camp or war in the play. Yet, Kopijowska could access a vast base of cultural material to evade censorship, as the majority of the Polish inmates in Ravensbrück could easily recognize allusions to Polish history, literature, and the 19th-century loss of nationhood. The Polish inmates were, moreover, accustomed to the szopka's role as a satirical and moralizing force in prewar society and could expect a transformative experience through the carnivalesque release of societal tensions.
By building on the emphasis that recent scholarship places on the importance of continuity in prewar practices and the transformation of cultural symbols in the camps, this article challenges the misconception that the extraordinary acts of violence compelled extraordinary responses from the victims. Moreover, it resists the tendency to superficially categorize music and theater productions created by victims of the Nazi regime as forms of resistance or solace without a nuanced exploration of the performers' and artists' motivations.

Plot Overview and Analysis
List of Characters The plot of Szopka Polska is relatively simple, but this production showcases the genre's mix of folk and elite entertainment. Kopijowska consciously used 16th-through 18th-century carols and traditional characters to frame the more modern music and characters in the middle of each act. These comparatively newer carols from the mid-19th century consider the Nativity story in light of the Partition era struggles and include calls for restored nationhood. trope is also associated with the young shepherd Maciek, who has a prominent role in several carols and older szopki as he hears the news before the older shepherds.
The Shepherds plan to bring the Christ Child fresh butter, bread, and cheese for his health. In Cracovian szopki, the Polish Shepherds offer regional dairy products, emphasizing pride in the Polish highlander fare. In Szopka Polska, these lines do not strictly follow a particular older script, but the Shepherds' dialogue rhymes to fit into the traditional material.
Before the Shepherds meet others en route to the manger scene at the end of the first act, there is a short comedic skit between the puppets Dziad and Szczepan, likely performed in front of the curtain to facilitate a scene change. After the interlude, the

Ritual Framework in the Szopka Polska
Kopijowska relies on ritualistic storytelling techniques to guide her audience, including introductions, symbolic characters, and frequent invocations in archaic, rhyming, or biblically stylized language. These features create an immersive experience through soundscapes, an aural landscape composed of auditory references to homeland and heritage. References include familiar texts, tunes with specific cultural associations, and manners of speech that infused the camp soundscape with layered historical invocations. The carol or melody used for a puppet's voice was as crucial to the portrayal of the character as their physical features. The puppets with biblical origins wore old-fashioned robes (see Figure 1) and spoke through fragments of centuriesold carols, featuring archaic-sounding Polish and Latin lyrics, visually and aurally contrasting with the music and costumes of the young Szczepan and the three modern puppets.
Kopijowska states in her introduction, which does not have an indicated tune or lyric quotations, that their szopka was a gift to cheer and encourage the inmates, especially the children, with a fond childhood staple, and to "move them emotionally" in a camp environment that had caused many inmates to become numb. under foreign rule to stand in for the Third Reich, but this vague enemy is not defeated.
Instead of providing hope through defeating Hitler in allegory, Kopijowska, like Rydel, promotes unity and prays for future independence. with a comical puppet called Szczepan, a younger character from a cheerful, early 1900s Polish carol. Dziad is a stock character of an old beggar, more commonly known as Dziadek, a diminutive form of the word, which has origins in 16th-and 17th-century ribałts [burgher comedic plays] (Segel, 1958: 73 As Kopijowska did not include heavier thematic material or the scenes that feature Herod's decrees and demise, this playful interlude visually and aurally contrasted with the environment itself, serving as a moment of levity in the camp. Szczepan and Dziad have elements of historical fool characters, and they try to make the audience laugh, invoking comedy associated with street puppet shows. The second verse describes how whoever hears Szczepan whistle his toy will smile from ear to ear, and the refrain features musical laughter, 'Hi-hi-hi-hi-ha-ha-ha'. The scene, which relies on comical folk motifs, serves to cheer the audience before the politically themed carols in the rest of the first act and the emotional second act where the characters beseech Jesus for deliverance at the manger.

Dziad and Szczepan
The Dziad and Szczepan scene was tailored to the needs of the children in the camp. The lack of Herod's plotline or a traditional folklore character that features a darker storyline, such as Pan Twardowski, were conscious changes. Not all types of humor found in prewar productions were well received in the camp environment. For example, a marionette production of Punch (from the Punch and Judy plays), which was a popular type of puppet theater before the war, was performed in the Germanspeaking barracks and upset the children (Helm, 2016: 521). The performance recreated a popular experience of childhood and evoked the adults' childhood memories, but the violence took on a new context in the barracks because it was not humorous when the guards' unpredictable violence permeated daily life.

Wiarus
Wiarus, the archetypal character of an older military veteran, is a figure from the Partition era which embodies the soldiers who faithfully fought for Poland's freedom.
Unfortunately, the watercolor of this puppet did not survive or was not created.
His presence in the play invokes several layers of Polish history and ideology, and his character functions as a quasi-prophetic sage, singing an altered version of the In the second act, Wiarus pushes the action forward by singing the third verse of 'Wśród nocnej ciszy' that describes humans singing with angels, encouraging the puppets and the audience to give the infant Jesus the gift of Polish music. This verse is from the version of this carol sung in midnight Mass liturgy after the Gloria. In the ritual context, as the second verse describes the arrival of the long-awaited savior, the tension resolves when everyone arrives at the manger scene and sings together, creating an emotional high point in the spectacle.
Wiarus addresses the audience to encourage the inmates to sing along and participate in the social ritual. Bartmiński (1990: 88) observes that several Polish carols reference the gift of song as a form of 'adoration akin to offering the heart'. The shepherds   (Tieszen, 2007: 220). The puppet in the painting is gaunt, pale, and has a weary look on her face, a striking visual departure from Berezowska's painting of the Häftling puppet (Figure 4) and her inmate portraits, which depict healthy and happy women (Gajewski, n.d.).  (Wyspiański, 1964 The Häftling puppet (Figure 4) was painted in the style Berezowska used for the camp inmates. Her face looks healthier than the gaunt painting of the Polish Mother.
When Berezowska painted portraits of the inmates that were sent to families outside the camp, she did not paint the harsh camp reality. Instead, she painted the women as if they were happy and healthy, with color in their cheeks, reminding them of the individuals they were before they became a number in the camp system (Czyńska, 2018: 120 Berezowska and Kopijowska were among the many inmates interned for a political crime, involvement in resistance activities led by the Polish Underground, or a perceived slight against the Reich (Saidel, 1999). This message of their innocence, combined with the inmate puppet's portrayal of a healthy woman, models a powerful subversion of the circumstances forced upon the interned women. The portrayal of the Häftling choosing God's grace despite her suffering helps the audience cope with Nazi oppression and makes salvation, both spiritual and physical, more personal. This puppet subtly demonstrates that, no matter what the guards tell the children, the inmates' resistance activities before the internment were just, challenging the Nazis' portrayal of the war.

Children of Warsaw (1944)
During the last Christmas in the camp, conditions were deteriorating due to overcrowding and dwindling supplies. Kopijowska added a skit for two children, Maciek and Joasia, titled Dzieci Warszawy [Children of Warsaw], to the 1944 performance, although the text is not intact. These real interned children addressed the Holy Family on stage and the children in the audience, further embedding the inmates into the world of the szopka and blurring the line between audience and performers. The children model productive behavior as they tell the Christ Child that they, along with the other Polish children in the audience, will guide him until they return to Warsaw.
They ask him not to be sad when he sees how bad things are in the camp because, as Polish children, they can protect and enlighten him. These lines bestow the children with a divine purpose and motivate them to learn about Polish heritage.
There is no evidence to indicate that Kopijowska and Berezowska ascribed to the Bauhaus philosophy on empathy, but they used similar techniques. Linney Wix (2009), in her analysis of Friedl Dicker-Brandeis's Bauhaus derived teaching philosophy of art as a conduit for empathy, argues that the benefits of cultural activities for children in the camps and ghettos extended beyond distraction.
Dicker-Brandeis taught art 'from a perspective designed to inspire creative work that would help children overcome their inevitable difficulties' and believed that inspiring creativity could teach children to '[see] beyond appearances' (Wix, 2009: 152-3). Combining Dicker-Brandeis's approach with ritual studies reveals how Szopka Polska promoted social participation, as sensory acts are similarly integral to the experiences of a szopka performance. Rather than drawing, the act of communal singing from a shared body of carols provided a similar grounding effect that aided in accessing the empathy and emotion needed to process Kopijowska's message.
Through her play, Kopijowska teaches the children, and reminds the adults, to see beyond the Nazis' portrayal of the world.

Conclusion
Returning to Kopijowska's introduction, her lines 'to forget about reality' and the 'world Berezowska explained that Kopijowska sought to provide cultural events to 'save the minds tormented by the camp life' (Czyńska, 2018: 119). As with other cultural activities, the Polish women and children who attended the Szopka Polska were active participants due to the medium's ritual features, rather than a passive audience engaging in escapism. The archaic elements, traditional music and puppets, and brief humorous moments aurally and visually gave the inmates respite from the harsh camp reality and helped them prepare for the ritual transformation. Additionally, the inmates could historicize, and thereby make sense of their experiences, which provided a sense of control.