He grew up Catholic, certain of his place in the world, until in his twenties he learned that a central part of his identity had been deliberately withheld. He was Jewish, a truth his mother had buried because naming it once meant danger, and later meant complication. Nobody Told Me is the artistic work that emerged from that late revelation. It is not autobiography on stage. It is the reckoning that followed: what it takes to metabolise the truth of a family history that survived only as secrecy.

The play returns to the Warsaw Ghetto, where Dr Halina, the playwright’s grandmother, was a physician. Instead of re-staging historical sequence, Nobody Told Me enters the moral terrain inside it: the impossible medical decisions forced on those who insisted on healing when everything around them was engineered for destruction. The focus is not reconstruction for spectacle. It is the psychological and ethical weight of choosing to keep others alive within a system designed for erasure. Dr Halina remained committed to medicine at cost to herself. Her daughter was moved out of the ghetto for safety — the girl who later became the mother who raised her son Catholic to protect him from the same danger she once lived inside. This is the lineage the playwright inherited without narrative to go with it.

The work arrives at a time when religious identity is again fuelling division and suspicion globally and locally. Antisemitism has surged. So has religion-based contempt more broadly. Identity has become a shorthand for threat, allegiance, moral certainty. And this play arrives with a difficult contemporary question: how can we believe we know who to hate, who to fear, who to categorise when so many people don’t even fully know who they are? When parts of identity can be amputated for survival and passed down as silence?

After several South African Directors declined the opportunity, a Bulgarian Jewish director whose body of work is defined by fearless creative experimentation in film and theatre alike, was chosen. That reluctance is not incidental. It reveals something essential about the work itself: the psychological force of this history is not only backward-looking. It still exerts pressure. It still shapes where we are unwilling to look.

The emotional labour embedded in the writing is evident not in confession, but in restraint. The play does not sensationalise pain. It attends instead to what it means to honour a history that was never permitted to be spoken. In that sense, Nobody Told Me is more than dramatic work; it is an act of ethical acknowledgement: a son making space for a lineage that was silenced because silence once protected life.

Silence of this kind does not simply expire. It leaves a charge in the system. Even when historical facts are suppressed, they continue to shape behaviour, relationship and emotional atmosphere across generations. Nobody Told Me does not claim that naming truth resolves the past but it insists that telling the story matters because not telling it has consequences. And in a world still organised around inherited suspicion and religious certainty, the play suggests that art may be one of the few remaining spaces where we can metabolise what was forbidden to speak – where memory can become meaning, and where meaning can become a form of justice.

When what was buried can finally be spoken, people stop defending and can begin thinking and dialogue becomes the only thing that interrupts repetition.

I first met Luc as the father of three. All of his children are grown but we have stayed friends, perhaps unusually. Somewhere in the exchange of information between friends I learned of his history, his family history. I could not believe my ears, here was a man younger than me living in the 21st century, his mother a holocaust survivor. His grandmother was a doctor in the Warsaw ghetto, scene of heroic resistance to the Nazis. And then the most shattering of all, his grandmother had sent her children out of the ghetto and got onto the train to Treblinka with her patients. Luc‘s mother had raised him a Catholic and only when he arrived in Poland in his 20s and met cousins did he learn of his heritage.

Understandably, this changed his perspective on himself, his family and the world, permanently. We, South African audiences are incredibly privileged to share the fruits of the passion that he has poured into the insights and reflections that were born of his process. He has converted it into a finely human play that captures so many themes that resonate today.

I have attended a rehearsal and I have seen the young actors from across the South African spectrum moving vigorously about the stage, working to articulate with clarity, I have seen the strength of the lead character’s acting ability, the original staging and interpretation that the Bulgarian director, Iliana, has brought to bear on the material to give it life. It is very different to the usual fare of the Sandton Theatre on the Square. Luc has been guided through innumerable drafts by English and South African playwrights and it shows in the deeply thought through dialogue and action. It reveals the kind of thing you see in Montecasino to be the frippery that it is, and is a welcome break from the superannuated protest theatre that the Market Theatre continues to pour out. This is theatre at its most inspiring.

I found your play by turns very moving, insightful, and unsentimental. The last because it didn’t look for happy endings, instead not flinching away from the fact that there simply couldn’t be any, given the circumstances.

The director did a really very good job, I thought, creating an atmosphere which entirely drew one in. And the actors were excellent. I thought the young woman who played your mother was particularly good, both as a little girl and as an old lady. She really observed your mom well.

Thanks for this, its an important addition to our collective understanding of a most significant moment in history which is still with and in us.

Luc that was astoundingly brilliant. So deeply profound.

The words and the dialogue was hauntingly moving. It captures something beyond words actually.

And choreography was something magical, and the actors carried it out with magnificence. They captured and conveyed the essence of what you wanted to achieve. Luc how absolutely beautiful!

Such a great play. Damn, it really moved me. And from an artistic point of view it is so stimulating. There is so much imagination used. And visually is also very symbolic.

I’ve just gotten home from a really moving show which I recommend everyone to see. Not only is it so emotional, but the acting was excellent, as was the creativity.

We were invited to attend because we know the writer, but I’m so glad I went and I think it’s so important. It was the opening night, so there was a panel after the show and something very touching was said:

“Remembering is not only healing, it’s also justice…”

We have a responsibility as Jews, especially in today’s times, to keep listening to the stories and keep talking about them, so that in a way, justice can be served.

And this show was more than just listening and hearing the stories. It was feeling. It left such an impact.

We need to keep the memories alive so we understand and remember what can happen, and so we can ensure “NEVER AGAIN”.