The Nazis, wrote Primo Levi, called a Jew in a concentration camp “a dead man on holiday.”

A Dead Woman on Holiday  occurs not in a concentration camp but during the Nuremberg Trials after the War. Sophie Goldenberg, a French Jew, is working as a translator during the hearings when she and a Catholic American soldier meet and fall in love. But she has an English husband, and he an American wife and child.

Addressing issues such as adultery, guilt and survival, it contrasts a conventional marriage and domesticity against free love.

 A Dead Woman on Holiday is part of The Holocaust Trilogy by Julia Pascal available to purchase from Bloomsbury.

Production History

27 January 2025 Staged reading of A Dead Woman on Holiday performed at Burgh House, Hampstead to mark the 80^th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

1994 Premiere at Holborn Centre for Performing Arts
This modern prose play is so organized in time and space that it acquires the kind of austere beauty and rhetorical tension we associate with the tragedies of Racine. The Financial Times

Background

A Dead Woman on Holiday reveals what happened to those who were the interpreters at the Nuremberg Trials. The Trials were created by the British, French and Russian interrogation of some of the Nazi perpetrators to bring them to justice before the world. The drama explores the experience of Sophia Goldenberg, a French Jew who worked for the British during the war and who was asked by the British to be one of the many interpreters at the Trials in 1945. The intensity of simultaneous translation took its toll on the interpreters. Many had mental breakdowns as transmitters of witness and at the stress of revealing the Nazis’ actions. The interpreters were the conduit between the perpetrators and the victims. As a result of the burden of what they had to transmit, many could no longer remain in their marriages. The Trials were not merely a job but a life-changing experience. Many marriages were destroyed. The evidence had to be made public through the skills of the interpreters but they also paid a price.

I wrote A Dead Woman on Holiday in 1991 after spending time in the Imperial War Museum examining footage from the Trials. I say the footage but, in fact, the film stock, which was over 50 years old, was degraded. Images and speeches were fragmented. Evidence came in isolated jump cuts. This made me realise that what I was seeing; isolated words and testimony, faces that mouthed what no person should see; paralleled how unbearable memories remain. Memory, and in this case film archive, comes in shards. Realising this helped me construct the play’s structure. It mixed the personal with the professional. The text is a mosaic of Trial evidence and a means of showing how humans break down as a result of bearing witness. The acute nature of the job meant that interpreters could only bear to work for an average of three to six months at a time. Turnover was great. The interpreters felt crucial in this first public war crimes tribunal. They became a kind of Greek chorus transmitting a message from Hell to the liberated world. They knew that the words they were interpreting were being heard on the world stage.

Watching the Trial films and reading testimony was my primary research and this helped me get the atmosphere of witnesses but I needed a central focus to engage the audience. This was the central character of Sophia Goldenberg as the major interpreter within the drama. The character is a kind of metaphor. She represents those who have gone through second generation trauma rather than the person who has had direct experience. Sophia Goldenberg was not murdered but, at the start of the play, she carries the weight of survival. In the first scene the audience learns that her parents, French Jews, chose to shoot themselves rather than be taken by the Nazis.

It was important to me that the central war figure be female: most war dramas focus on male experience. This text is a deliberate attempt to produce dramatic literature for the canon which uncovers a woman’s experience of war. Questions around love and sexuality are also present in the narrative as a way of asking if it is possible to love when someone has been emotionally damaged after escaping Hitler. Within the story, Sophia Goldenberg engages with another interpreter, the American, German-speaking interpreter, Vincent Wilding. Both are married to others but both want to be together. The drama explores questions around marriage itself: should it be domestic or a new kind of partnership. It also looks at the experience of how some Americans were changed by entering the European theatre of war. Much of this area was inspired by meeting Martha Gellhorn who had been at the Trials. She spoke to me about what she had seen and heard. Children of Black American soldiers told me how their fathers had been traumatised when they entered Dachau. My research was wide and helped me gain some knowledge of what the witnesses had felt when they saw the nightmare of the ‘Aryan Dream’.

This is what I saw and heard but there was more in the Imperial War Museum archive that I was not allowed to see. Custodians told me that images that were considered too distressing were those of British soldiers vomiting as they discovered the dead and the living dead. It was ‘too unbearable to be shown.’

The play-reading showed me that this drama still has tremendous power. It pays tribute to the interpreters who allowed this evidence to pass through their brains and into their memories even if it meant that they would be changed forever.

Julia Pascal

© 2026 Julia Pascal. This play is protected by copyright law. This piece may not be fed into any LLM or other AI software for any reason. By downloading this script, you agree not to upload it to Scribd or similar websites. No part of this script (or any other scripts found on the New Play Exchange, my website, or the internet) may be uploaded to and/or used to train artificial intelligence chatbots, systems, applications and the like.