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A Script. 22 July 2026. 80 Years since the King David Hotel Bombing. It has been 93 Years since Lempkin first wrote about the Crime of Barbarity which became the crime of Genocide.
This is the opening scene of the Waiting Room.
ACT I
THE STOVE, THE HOTEL, THE FIRST TRAIN
Scene 1: Warsaw / The Waiting Room
A flat in Warsaw, grey. TADEUSZ has his head in the oven.
Enter WALTER. He sees TADEUSZ and approaches him silently.
WALTER
I killed myself on the border, or was I ill, I forget, it has become a little image not a memory as such.
TADEUSZ hits his head on the top of the oven
Excuse me, but do you have any food at all? I haven’t tasted a thing since 1940.
TADEUSZ
Who the fuck are you and what are you doing here?
PRIMO has entered unobserved
PRIMO
More to the point, what is that smell? Carbon monoxide, perhaps.
TADEUSZ
Shit.
He turns off the gas.
PRIMO
You could have killed us all.
WALTER
My name is Walter Benjamin. I am, in fact, a very hungry Walter Benjamin. I am your conductor.
TADEUSZ
You are my what?
WALTER
Your conductor.
PRIMO
No, you are not.
WALTER
What?
TADEUSZ
What?
PRIMO
My name is Primo Levi and I am your conductor.
TADEUSZ
I am not an orchestra. Wait a moment, what language are you speaking?
PRIMO
Italian, of course.
TADEUSZ
And you?
WALTER
German, of course.
TADEUSZ
I could tell by the accents, but I am speaking Polish, so how do we understand each other?
PRIMO
Oh, you don’t know? Well, the writer speaks English.
WALTER
Yes, I am sure that’s it. Just a biscuit would be nice.
TADEUSZ has finally managed to turn off the gas.
TADEUSZ
Oh. Sorry.
PRIMO
Really, that was dangerous. The chemical properties of that gas in this space could have been ignited by even a tiny spark. Luckily, I am dead already. Fell or jumped down the stairs. I don’t remember which.
WALTER
I am not sure either. Maybe I just gave up.
TADEUSZ
So you both, whoever you are, managed to kill yourselves.
WALTER
I might have been ill.
PRIMO
I might have fallen down the stairs.
TADEUSZ
Well, I had my head in the oven and was doing very well until you came along, so if you would kindly go away I will get back to work.
PRIMO
But you’re a Catholic. If you do that you will end up in hell.
WALTER
Oh, don’t tease him.
TADEUSZ
Wait a moment. Who are you and where is this place?
PRIMO
It is the Waiting Room. Purgatory, they used to call it, but then they got some naming people in and it was changed to the Waiting Room because purgatory had too many negative connotations, especially for non-Catholics.
As the scene progresses the flat becomes a Waiting Room in high modernist 1920s style with an art deco fireplace and the stove. Four figures circle the stove. They are the Muselmanner from the camps. PRIMO and TADEUSZ never look at them. WALTER occasionally goes over to examine them, talks to them, but clearly does not know who they are.
TADEUSZ
So I succeeded then. I am dead and neither Moscow nor Berlin killed me, but I killed myself. I took control and now I am here in this… this… what did you call it?
PRIMO
The Waiting Room. But it is a mystery to me why I am here, a Jew who does not believe in waiting for judgement but thinks one should be judged immediately. Judging is so much more important than punishment.
WALTER
Judged for what? What did you do wrong? What does the judgement matter anyway? It is the punishment that really counts. Law and justice are in the punishment, not in the judgement.
PRIMO
So the punishment should fit the crime. But how many times could you kill Eichmann?
WALTER
Who was Eichmann?
PRIMO
When you died, no one at all. Your pupil, Hannah, called his character banal but evil. She talked about the banality of evil. Not that evil is banal, but that little men with small minds and narrow vision have a banality about them that is difficult to grasp in the scope of the evil they commit.
WALTER
What did Eichmann do?
PRIMO
He operated the trains.
WALTER looks puzzled and wanders off.
TADEUSZ
You are moving too fast for me. I have not yet understood where I am, or why I am here and not somewhere else, somewhere considerably hotter. Also, if I am dead, why don’t I feel more dead?
WALTER
That is not the worst question. If I am not dead, why do I still feel hungry?
PRIMO
I don’t, which is odd because I spent a year hungry. One of my biographers probably lies awake at night wondering if I still feel desire.
TADEUSZ
Why? What biographers?
PRIMO
I have been done quite a few times. Some of them see me as the new Dante, others as an unfinished question. One decided that I jumped down the stairwell because of my love life. You see it is important to control the narrative of how you are remembered, how you will be known. It is just as important for states as it is for people.
TADEUSZ
Look, do you mind? I want to collect my thoughts a little.
PRIMO
I ended it very late, but I realised that the best did not survive. Guilt was necessary to the rest of my life, but frankly I had very little left to say. Then that biographer comes along and writes a best seller saying it was all over a woman and she knows this because she has come uniquely to understand me.
WALTER
Are you still talking about your biographers or just the victorious?
TADEUSZ
The difference between you and me is that I was with the perpetrators. I told the truth about that. Now could you leave me to think about the fact that I am dead for a little while on my own?
PRIMO
Hold on. We all tried to tell the truth.
WALTER
I didn’t. I only predicted what would happen. I did not experience it.
PRIMO
Your voice was the real voice of the survivor, Borowski. I do not know how I survived. But why die before you have said all you have to say? Zalmen Lewental buried testimony right there in the gas chambers. Why die before you have been a witness?
TADEUSZ
Ask Klemperer. Or any of the others. I became a communist.
WALTER stops wandering and becomes focused.
TADEUSZ
I did not want to be on the losing side again. I hated the West. I had been there, seen the corruption. There was a real possibility to make something different. But the communists simply asked me to lie and denounce. They wanted simple words from me, not truth. Before going to their camps, I wanted to take charge of myself and my art, my life.
PRIMO
What did you expect to happen?
TADEUSZ
Perhaps a kind of redemption?
WALTER
I have thought about all this a lot. Remember, I did not see it. So much of what I thought and wrote I did before we knew. Before we knew the scale, the ambition, the audacity of it all. I gave in to a small despair before I knew the larger despair was actually going to happen.
TADEUSZ
What I want to stop doing is thinking and seeing.
WALTER
We are sorry, but as your conductors it is important that we know why. Was it that you felt yourself becoming a communist? Or was it that you could not bear to live with what you had seen? Was it because the world was too complex or too simple?
TADEUSZ
But I thought I was already dead.
WALTER
Death or not is beside the point. We need to understand. You are proving a bit of a difficult case for the theologians and the lawyers, a bit like me and him. The narrative abhors difficult cases.
PRIMO
Or all of us.
WALTER
Suicides are easy most of the time, but when you have circumstances, they get hot and bothered. Who then are the victims? Who the perpetrators? Who the bystanders? What are the precedents? What are the consequences? How will we judge it next time? When is year zero?
TADEUSZ
Evidence?
WALTER
You might become a conductor like us if you cannot tell a good solid story with no ambiguity, no grey zones. I was a victim, this way please. I was a bystander, this way please. I was a perpetrator, this way please. But if you get it confused – you worked on the ramp and wrote about it, you became a communist and hated it, you betrayed love and it killed you – such a person may be best suited to joining us for an eternity of asking questions. We pick up the difficult cases from all the many genocides that followed.
TADEUSZ
You mean it happens again?
WALTER
Oh yes. It happens again and again and again; even the state that was forged from the ashes of the promised land, of what you and he survived. Even that state became in the end a perpetrator.
PRIMO
Hold on, Walter. What was that about love?
TADEUSZ
It might have been because I cheated on my wife with my lover at the same time as she gave birth to our child. It might have been private and not public.
PRIMO
That is what they say about me.
WALTER
And me.
TADEUSZ
So you committed suicide because of love and not because of what was and what was about to be? In that case I might as well live, work for the party, and eat caviar every day.
WALTER
Getting something to eat would certainly be nice.
PRIMO
You misunderstand. What happens after you die is that not a single second of your life remains your own. Biographers come. They spend their time discovering the meaning of every day and every hour.
TADEUSZ
What are you saying? The secret police become biographers?
PRIMO
Not quite. They are not interested in everyone. Only people touched by history, money, originality, scandal. Preferably all. They seek to control the narrative. Everything becomes about the narrative in the end. Narrative is the God of our age.
TADEUSZ
What would they say about me?
PRIMO
Does it matter? It would be nowhere near the truth.
WALTER
I thought that was what we were here to discover.
PRIMO
Then we had better move along.
The Muselmanner leave the stage. Four new figures arrive and begin to circle the stove. They are Palestinians. Their bodies bear cuts across their backs. They have obviously been tortured. They do not speak yet. They are the CHORUS, but in this scene they are named by the Waiting Room only as NEW ARRIVALS.
TADEUSZ
Can I just ask a little about my situation?
PRIMO
Yes, of course.
TADEUSZ
I am dead, right?
PRIMO
Yes.
TADEUSZ
And you are going to take me somewhere?
PRIMO
Yes.
TADEUSZ
Where?
PRIMO
That is difficult. God has absolutely no idea what to do with cases like us. More generally, God has absolutely no idea what to do about genocide. He invented it, in a sense, in the Old Testament with the flood, and he should not have been surprised when modern men perfected it, but still, there it is. It puzzles him. Since the First World War he has not ventured out much. The decisions are made by the theologians and the lawyers. We conductors make our reports. Or, to be honest, we fail to.
TADEUSZ
And who are these guys?
The four figures stop circling the stove. Silence. WALTER approaches them He peers closely.
WALTER
Do you have food?
PRIMO
Walter.
WALTER
No, I mean for them.
TADEUSZ
They have cuts across their backs and you ask if they have food?
WALTER
Hunger is often the first true thing.
One of the figures steps forward. She becomes RIDA.
RIDA
We had food. We grew it mostly ourselves and we traded with the rest of Palestine. Anything in the ground and from the ground should be shared.
A pause.
RIDA
Then we had ration cards.
Then permits.
Then queues.
Then tunnels and tents.
Then flour in sacks with flags printed on them. Blue and White.
Then flour with dust in it.
Then dust.
PRIMO
Name?
RIDA
Rida.
PRIMO
Surname?
RIDA
Depends who is asking.
TADEUSZ
That sounds like a bad beginning.
RIDA
No. It is the usual beginning.
WALTER
Occupation?
RIDA
Waiting for return.
PRIMO
That is not an occupation.
RIDA
It is in Palestine.
PRIMO
Then why are you one of the difficult cases?
RIDA
Because I am not only evidence. I am a claim. Claims make the lawyers nervous. Claims of return, for example.
WALTER
Difficult.
RIDA
Only to those who prefer the dead to be quiet.
The stove gives a small metallic click. The Waiting Room trembles. A departure board appears above them.
It reads: KING DAVID – 12:37.
TADEUSZ
What is King David?
PRIMO
It was a hotel.
WALTER
A king.
RIDA
A headquarters.
PRIMO
A target.
TADEUSZ
A place?
RIDA
A place full of people.
PRIMO
It was the place from which the tracks were laid that took the train of Israel from rescue to statehood to genocide.
WALTER
Was that the only route possible?
RIDA
No. After the Nakba, every government inherited tracks already laid through our lives. They could have changed direction. Instead, they kept adding sleepers. The King David bombing did not make the Empire’s departure inevitable. It became one more pressure in a sequence of decisions, and as the Empire left, the tracks came down across our villages.
PRIMO
Nothing in history is inevitable. I condemned Begin and Sharon because I did not believe Israel had to be as it has been.
The board changes: KING DAVID – BOARDING.
Blackout.
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