On the Edge: A Collection of 17 Hard-Hitting Christian Monologs for Youth Book

How can fascism, such as the likes of what happened in Germany, happen? Can you believe it will happen where you live? Is it just something unfortunate, like death, that happens to other people? "An Incident at Vichy" is a one-act play by Arthur Miller written in 1964 about a group of men who await interrogation and racial "identification" by German soldiers and French Police in Vichy, France. Most of them would seem to be Jews, though there is a non-Jewish (Gentile) businessman and a gypsy. They talk among themselves as they await their turn. Some are confident that everything will be ultimately okay. Others are terrified; they have heard rumors of Jews deported on trains to camps in boxcars, and mass murder.

This play takes a close-up view of a particular moment in time, in 1942, when people were just beginning to hear rumors of concentration camps--not possible! Why would the Germans exterminate people? They need workers! The men, most of whom will actually end up in concentration camps, we know, here get their noses actually measured, and they have their penises examined for evidence of circumcision. They have, most of them, fled from other, more completely Nazi-controlled areas of France. They are guilty! Yet the men waiting inspection doubt that they can be in any reL trouble; they're law-abiding citizens! Their papers are in order! They are in denial. Some (even the Jews here) seem to be at least passively complicit in supporting the Nazi-French regime. Hey, they're doing the best they can in a tough situation oour French cops. Don't rock the boat.

This play is chilling in showing how one of the most horrific events in human history took place for ordinary people, slowly, incrementally, quietly. In case you are wondering if this little "minor" play from Miller has any relevance to Trump's America, or what is happening in many countries in the world, I quote from Manny's fictional review: "When your country has been taken over by a gang of racist lunatics, there's no point in pretending that really everything is fine."