These surviving scripts and papers have a history almost as extraordinary as the performances they document. They were not discovered after the war in an official camp archive. They survived because Max Ehrlich deliberately arranged for them to be taken out of Westerbork while he was still a prisoner there.
A record Max wanted to survive
By 1944 Max understood that his situation was becoming desperate. The cabaret and revue productions of the Westerbork Theater Group had created an extraordinary body of work behind the barbed wire of a Nazi transit camp, and Max wanted a record of that work to survive whatever happened to him.
Among the prisoners were the actress and musician Jetty Cantor and her husband. Under Nazi racial classifications they were considered Jewish and were interned in Westerbork. Their son Jaap Cantor, however, was classified as “Aryan” and was permitted to visit his parents in the camp.
Max entrusted the artistic dossier to Jetty and asked that Jaap carry it out of Westerbork. The purpose was clear: the papers were to be kept for Max so that he could recover them if he were released and survived. If he did not survive, the dossier was nevertheless to be preserved so that this record of the Westerbork theater, its artists and their work would not be destroyed with them.
More than fifty years in Jaap Cantor’s custody
Jaap succeeded in taking the dossier out of the camp and retained it for more than half a century. It remained in his attic until around 2001. By then Max had of course long been known to have been murdered. Jaap at one point considered simply disposing of the old file, but he raised the question with someone else and, instead of throwing it away, ultimately transmitted it to the Theater Instituut Nederland in Amsterdam.
He did not attempt to sell the dossier or exploit it as an asset. Rather, his final act was to place it with an institution devoted to the history of theater. In that sense, the transfer to TIN continued the preservation purpose for which Max had originally entrusted the papers to the Cantor family.
Amsterdam, 2001
When the dossier re-emerged, I travelled to Amsterdam as Max Ehrlich’s sole surviving heir and examined it at TIN. I made the photocopies from which the documents reproduced in this section are derived.
I did not donate the dossier to TIN, nor did I transfer it to the institute. I chose at that time not to assert a claim to the papers because TIN appeared to me to be a worthy permanent repository. I was told that the dossier would be promoted and made freely available for research and academic consultation. That was precisely what I wanted: not financial advantage, but preservation of Max’s work and of the achievements of the remarkable artists who created theater in Westerbork.
From TIN to the University of Amsterdam
In practice, the dossier did not receive the public visibility and scholarly accessibility I had expected. Access became restricted and, as TIN increasingly emphasized contemporary Dutch theater, the existence of the file largely disappeared from view. TIN was subsequently dissolved and its theater collection was transferred to the University of Amsterdam; the former TIN collection is now held by the Allard Pierson.
Making the record visible again
This section of the Max Ehrlich website is intended to restore that visibility. The surviving scripts and related papers are presented according to the Westerbork productions to which they belong. The documents shown here reproduce my 2001 photocopies of the original dossier; they are therefore historical working copies rather than new scans of the original sheets.