Niusia

Niusia

How do you honour the legacy of a woman you hardly knew, and didn’t really like?

Tuesday 13 May, 2025 | 10.30am | GPAC Little Theatre

Niusia was a Holocaust survivor. Her granddaughter, Beth, only remembers an angry, dying woman. She’s ready to learn her stories, but what she discovers is all the questions she didn’t know existed and wasn’t allowed to ask.

Weaving together memories, handed-down stories, and interviews with family, Beth sets out to understand her nana’s complex legacy. She gives voice to the cruel thoughts you shouldn’t have about your Holocaust-surviving nana, stumbles upon her own Jewishness (something she used only to evade school church services), and ultimately confronts how deeply embedded these horrific memories are in her family line. She asks, “I’ve somehow always known these stories. When did I learn these stories, and how?”

Discovering what happens when aspiration becomes assimilation after fleeing war and devastation for belonging and safety, NIUSIA interrogates what remembrance looks like when all that is known are the spaces where questions should have gone. It is a story all too familiar to second, third, and fourth generation immigrants and the haphazard cultural legacies they are handed by their families and examines the precarity of reconciling these mixed identities.

Journey with Beth as she is shown the tenderness she missed out on, learns to laugh at the unlaughable, and wades through the complexity of trauma-laden memories, love, and familial relationships.

NIUSIA is part of the 2025 VCE Playlist for Drama Unit 3 

Duration: 75 minutes, no interval

*Access: Limited Allocation.

Age Restrictions: Recommended for ages 15+

Content Warnings: References to violence, war, antisemitism, concentration camps, war crimes, and genocide.