Goodbye Marianne

Sheree Haughian, a former teacher-librarian with the Dufferin County
Board of Education, is an editor with Gage Educational Publishing and
the author of The Private Journal of Day Applepenny, Prisoner.

Irene Watts’s poignant play Good-bye Marianne brilliantly compressed
into a spare 30 pages one child’s experience of the two weeks before
her exodus from Nazi Germany. Now the experiences of Marianne, who was
sent to England on the Kindertransporte (which was responsible for
saving 10,000 Jewish children in 1938–39), are revisited in this novel
of the same name.

The change of genre has not undermined this touching story. In fact,
the play’s recasting is likely to extend Watts’s readership. The
longer form has allowed her to explore issues and secondary characters
more fully, and to develop a stronger sense of their impact on Marianne.
Anti-Semitic slogans and policies that forbid her to attend school
illustrate the monstrous political climate, but the young schoolgirl
realizes the horror of her situation through the people she
encounters—the landlady, the Gestapo, and, most of all, her peers.

Inge, the proud Aryan who skips with Marianne in the park and then
recoils from her Jewish identity, is encountered once more in a Hitler
Youth parade. Ernest, an outsider to Berlin who sees beyond the Nazi
creed, is developed into a flesh-and-blood companion with a sense of
humor; he is no longer limited by the technical economies of stage
scenes and direct dialogue. However, it is Marianne’s mother who
benefits the most from the change of genre. Rather stiff and
one-dimensional in the play, she is represented here as an indulgent and
loving mother who is also a brave worker for the Kindertransporte.

Above all, the novel format allows Marianne’s perceptions and
emotions to be fully explored. While the adult characters tend to regard
the increasing restrictions on Jews as a passing inconvenience, Marianne
recognizes the accumulation of racial hatred as something very tangible.
“The list of forbidden activities was piling up like the compost heap
by the back fence.” In the play, where brevity was paramount, such a
statement might have seemed frivolous. In the novel, it is a an
expression of humanity at a time when humanity was most forsaken. Highly
recommended.