Recounting a Tragic Past Through the Eyes of Survivors ‘The Good and the True’ Recounts the Holocaust
Alexis SoloskiAugust 3, 2014: Milos Dobry and Hana Pravda have apparently never met. Possibly Milos saw one of Hana’s early films, like Marijka the Unfaithful. Maybe she strolled past a Prague soccer field where Milos made save after save at goal. Or maybe, a few years later — now wretched, terrified, half-starved — they might have crossed paths at Auschwitz. The Czech director Daniel Hrbek has twinned their stories in The Good and the True, at the DR2 Theater, a documentary drama assembled from testimony by Ms. Pravda, who died in 2008, and Mr. Dobry, who died in 2012. Here, little unites the lives of the actress Hana (Hannah D. Scott) and the athlete Milos (Saul Reichlin) except their Jewry and the horrors they suffered and witnessed. This brisk 70-minute drama begins with a few particulars of birth and upbringing, but almost immediately it shifts to the camps. At Terezin, the so-called model ghetto, there’s fear, abuse and privation, but also soccer and amateur theatrics. Predictably the story turns far grimmer as the setting shifts to Auschwitz. Milos recalls his arrival: “The doors crashed open. People fell and jumped from the train in the dark, gasping for air. Then searchlights, the dogs and the stamping of boots of the SS men, marching toward us.”
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