LAST year, a survey commissioned by the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust suggested that 5 per cent of Britain’s adults did not believe the nazis’ genocide of six million Jews ever took place, while one in 12 considered the numbers exaggerated.

“I was startled,” says Leeds Playhouse artistic director James Brining.

“I grew up with a real sense of the Holocaust but it maybe isn’t quite as prevalent in our lives as it has been.”

Brining is directing Dr Korczak’s Example in the Brammall Rock Void at Leeds Playhouse.  

Written by David Grieg, it tells the real-life story of Dr Janusz Korczak, whose thoughts about educating young people paved the way for the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child.

The director of an orphanage in the Warsaw Ghetto, Korczak was murdered, along with his 200 charges, in the Treblinka death camp in 1942.

“The fact there have been other genocides since made me think now would be a good time to do it again,” says Brining, who commissioned and originally directed the play in 2001.

“Its first ever performance took place on September 11 [that year] and I thought at the time: ‘What would you tell a child about that event?’ Do you tell them something complex and complicated or do you try sugar-coating it?”

Critic John Nathan has suggested Holocaust dramas tend to offer a sense of hope and redemption where none existed but, says Brining, “the play doesn’t really offer hope. This story happened. The cleverness of David Grieg’s writing is it doesn’t attempt to replicate those events in any naturalistic way.

“The play is called Dr Korczak’s Example and I guess the hope is contained in that. He pioneered a way of treating and educating children that eventually impacted on the UN Convention, so his example is a powerful one, given the massive degradation of human life we are talking about here.

“I’m not saying everything’s fine in the world because it so patently isn’t, but in a way the play is a call to arms, a reminder that what people believed in who fought in the second world war can never be taken for granted, and is by no means achieved now.”

If the play feels light, that is the point, Brining says. “It’s powerful and shocking on one level but don’t forget it was originally written to be performed in primary schools.

“Over the years it’s played to broader audiences than that but it has got a simple premise in the way it’s staged, which was always the original intention.”

Grieg introduces fictional characters to Korczak’s world, among them a 16-year-old boy called Adzio.

“Korczak represents the romantic view that we can change the world positively by our own behaviour and conduct,” says Brining.

“Adzio, on the other hand, [believes] you have to resist actively and potentially fight. We are invested in these characters; we care about their situation. It’s not easy. Both points of view are valid. That’s the tension which exists between them.”  

Brining is excited about the newly opened Rock Void space and designer Rose Revitt’s imaginative staging. “When I’ve done it before, it’s always been an arts-theatre experience. This is much more immersive.

“Rose’s design uses the natural atmosphere of the place, even the exposed rock which is part of the Void. She’s really responded to the environment and that feels quite ambitious, given it’s a small-scale play.”

Small-scale or not, Dr Korczak’s Example tackles the darkest chapter in human history. With far-right parties once again on the rise at home and across Europe, it is time to take a stand. Hope and redemption are in short supply these days.   

Dr Korczak’s Example runs from January 25-February 15, box office: leedsplayhouse.org.uk.