Review: Ne kahdeksan valittua

MORE SOON!

The country is healthy and strong when it is able to tackle the difficult times and solutions of its recent past, tear scabs, want discussion and heal. Finland is, is starting to be.

The play The Eight Chosen Ones, written by Heikki Ylikangas, describes the process that led Finland to hand over eight Jewish refugees to the Germans in the autumn of 1942. Only one of them, George the Third, survived Auschwitz.

The premiere on the small stage of the Helsinki City Theatre is immensely intense. The Auditorium knows that we are now dealing with fundamental issues, without an intense desire to know and understand. Ylikangas’s text is about the state leadership between a rock and a hard place, about the blackmail of the Germans: hand over a few Jews, in return you will receive grain and oil for a starving people.

In the play, none of the Finns are evil – the Germans are – and not holy. They are struggling under the pressure of circumstances, President Risto Ryti, Valpo chief Arno Anthoni, Minister of the Interior Toivo Horelli, Chief of the Army Control Department Paavo Kastari, and also Soviet spy Kerttu Nuorteva and writer Hella Wuolijoki on their own

The subject matter is such that you swallow a few lesson-like parts as part of it, and the actors are thanked for their scarcity, for their ability to cut out the essential and step into roles without fear, Hannu Lauri, Kari Mattila, Heikki Sankari, Jari Pehkonen and others. The simplistic direction is by the young Milko Lehto.

When you get home, you have to start digging for more information: what happened after that?