Concentration camp not everything there was about Janka

By Pat Jones, Centralia Chronicle

(Centralia, WA) April 14, 2005 – “Janka” is the story of one woman’s will to survive the Holocaust. It’s also the life she eventually made for herself in America with a husband. Bob Speace, and their two children — twin boys.

A play by that name is free, and will be presented at Centralia College’s Studio Theatre at 7:30 p.m. Friday in a one-woman performance by actress and singer Janice Noga.

“Janka” is based upon a letter written 1945 by Janka Festinger Speace (1916-1994) about slave labor and her years in Nazi concentration camps near Munich. Oscar Speace, the play’s creator, is Janka’s son.

Noga is Speace’s wife and Janka's daughter-in-law, and you can still hear the tears in her voice when she recalls the horrors that her not-yet mother-in-law shared with her more than 20 years ago over coffee in the Speaces’ New Jersey kitchen.

Speace is an Emmy-winning television producer and writer, and director of several screen and stage plays. His dream is to one day do “Janka. One Minute of Perfect Happiness,” a film documentary based upon his mother’s experiences.

Friday’s performance may be free for the audience, but Speace and Noga will receive a stipend and hope this, and money from other such performances, will help make the dream of a PBS documentary a reality.

Noga enjoys portraying Janka and has been cast previously in New York theater, as well as performing in concerts from New York to Los Angeles and abroad.

“I met his mom,” said Noga, who actually met Janka when she was still dating Speace.

He wanted her to meet his mother, but as a divorced Catholic with a child, Noga had some concerns.

“Will your mother like me?” she asked with a little fear in her voice. She was disconcerted when Speace answered, “No.”

When the couple arrived at the Speace family home, Noga tried her best to “sleep in” the next morning so she wouldn’t be alone with Janka. Thinking the coast was clear she made her way to the kitchen where, to her horror, she discovered Janka alone.

“She got coffee for me and we went out to the porch,” recalls a tearful Noga. “And she told me things about the Holocaust she had never told her sons. I listened and I listened, and my heart just broke.”

Speace said the conversation between his then-future wife and his mother led him to understand that it was easier for Janka to tell a stranger these things than her sons.

At one point she did tell Speace she had once written a “book” about her experiences, but that no one had been interested in it, For years, the book couldn’t be found.

“When mom passed away my wife wanted me to write a play about her, so wrote this outline and sent it to an aunt in Canada,” said Speace.

The aunt was his mother’s sister.

“It’s a nice play,” she said when Speace contacted her, “but it’s not really what happened.” After a pause, she continued, “I have your mom’s book.”

“I was flabbergasted,” he recalls.

Speace’s first task, after receiving the book,was to get the nearly 6o handwritten notebook pages, which were written in Hungarian, translated.

“It was very emotional,” recalls Speace of the nine months spent translating the document. “We cried (he and the translator), and then Janice and I cried again when we read it at home.”

Speace said his mother had always felt blessed, particularly given the horrific treatment of twins in the concentration camps, to have given birth to twins of her own — Oscar and David.

Speace, when asked what his mother would do if she could sit in an audience and watch “Janka,” said, “She would be beaming from ear to ear.”