I visited Auschwitz 27 years ago. I'd met a pair of Dutch guys on the train and we'd bought some beers off the guard and we'd had plenty of laughs about staging The Olympics like Miss World, with events run in national costume and then swimwear. We were more sombre once we passed under the "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign and soon the words dried up completely. Before the end of the official tour, we sat on a set of steps for a while under a cloudless sky, before - still wordless - one of us upped and walked back towards the railway station and the other two followed. The words returned once we passed again under the sign.
The Holocaust can do that - and a lot more. Its scale, its depravity, its thoroughgoing, relentless cruelty can overwhelm language and, thus, consciousness. Not the least of the triumphs of The Pianist of Willesden Lane (at St James Theatre until 27 February) is the centrality of music to its story, a glorious flowering of German culture that was to be so perverted after the fall of the Weimar Republic. In an evening full of light and dark, the music reminds us that joy persisted (and persists), even in such miserable circumstances. Mona Golabek tells us the story of her mother, Lisa Jura. A girl possessed of a burgeoning musical talent, at 14 she is sent on the Kindertransport train from Vienna to London where, separated from her parents and sisters, she fetches up at a crowded house in North London and ultimately goes on to The Royal Academy of Music and the United States. There's lots of teen girl stuff of course - the crushes, the propositions, the eventual marriage - but there's the dull ache of loss too, as Lisa and her distant family do what they can to survive and to connect.Videos