The Soap Myth is a 2009 play by American playwright Jeff Cohen. The play had a workshop run in July 2009 at the Dog Run Repertory Company, and had an Off-Broadway run in the fall of 2009.[1]
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Although The Soap Myth is a work of fiction, it is, in the words of the program, "inspired by real people and real events as well as an article written by Josh Rolnick in Moment magazine profiling Holocaust survivor Morris Spitzer."[1]
Foremost among the play's historical inspirations is the evidence that the Nazi regime had a program at the Danzig Anatomic Institute in 1944 to develop a process for the mass-production of soap from the fat of Jews being slaughtered in Nazi extermination camps, and produced soap in small quantities at a nearby concentration camp. In a dramatic moment, the players re-enact testimony from the Nuremberg Trials, including this recipe:
"5 kilos of human fat are mixed with 10 liters of water and 500 or 1,000 grams of caustic soda. All this is boiled 2 or 3 hours and then cooled. The soap floats to the surface while the water and other sediment remain at the bottom. A bit of salt and soda is added to this mixture. Then fresh water is added and the mixture again boiled 2 or 3 hours. After having cooled, the soap is poured into molds."[2]
The play's central character, is an elderly Holocaust survivor called Milton Saltzman, based on actual survivor named Morris Spitzer who worked doggedly to establish as fact the idea that the Nazis produced and used soap made from human corpses, even handing bars of such soap to Jews on their way into the sealed chambers that functioned alternately as gas chambers and as shower rooms in the Nazi concentration camps.[3]
The second character is a young journalist called Annie Blumberg assigned to write a story about Saltzman. She is soon caught between her sympathies for Saltzman and the adamant stand of a number of distinguished scholars of the Holocaust who refuse to publish the Nazi manufacture of soap as fact despite a large amount of eyewitness testimony, including the eyewitness testimony of both Nazis and British prisoners of war at the Nuremberg trial who worked in the experimental soap manufacturing facility at Danzig in 1944, because contemporary documentation is lacking. The scholars in the play fear that without proof beyond the eyewitness testimony, the story of the manufacture of soap from human bodies will become ammunition in the hands of Holocaust deniers.[2][3]
Three characters representing historians of the Holocaust argue strongly that although a large number of eye-witnesses including former British POWs, Nazis, and Holocaust survivors have testified about the soap production, because no actual laboratory or production records survive as physical documents, any publication about the production of soap will be used by Holocaust deniers to discredit the reality of the Holocaust itself and, therefore, that no assertions that any soap production took place should be published.[3]
A character called Brenda Goodsen, an amalgam of a number of Holocaust deniers including David Irving, makes a dramatic case for minimizing the Holocaust or concluding that the Jews brought it on themselves. Comic relief is added by a character called Rabbi Schmooey based loosely on Rabbi Shmuley Boteach.[3]
Holocaust historian Robert Melvin Spector concludes that the Nazis "did indeed use human fat for the making of soap at Stutthof," albeit in limited quantity.[4]
The material in the Nuremberg Trial scenes in the play use as dialogue actual testimony given by British prisoners of war and by Nazis at the historical trials about the development of an industrial process for producing soap from human bodies at the Danzig Anatomic Institute, the production of such soap on a small-scale basis at Stutthof concentration camp, and the actual use of this soap by Nazi personnel.[5][6][7][8]
Several reviews ran while the play was being rewritten on an ongoing basis during the workshop production at South Street Seaport in July 2009.[1]
The New York Times called the play a "pointed investigation of the politics of history."[9]
Time Out New York wrote that the play "touches on a host of compelling issues: irrefutable versus empirical evidence, the subjective shaping of history, institutional agendas and, in its most effective scene, the potential seduction of anti-Semitism. But faulty dramaturgy—Annie's unnecessary narration egregiously flouts the show-don't-tell rule—and points of view in place of complex people drain the proceedings of any nuance. There's something dreadfully wrong with a Holocaust drama in which the most engaging character hates Jews.[10]
According to NYTheater.com, "It's the dazzling objectivity and even-handedness of the play that gives it real moral heft..."[11]
The reviewer for The Villager found it compelling, "There are certain movies, plays, books that one wishes would never end. For me, The Soap Myth is one of those extraordinary plays."[2]
In a Youtube video, an interviewer asks people in a New York City park about "the soap myth." The final interviewee is actor Joel Friedman, in character as Milton Saltzman, giving the compelling account, excerpted from the play, of how it felt to be a twelve-year-old boy in a Nazi concentration camp forced to shower using soap made from the bodies of his dead parents.[3]