Tragedy and triumph vie for the upper hand during this tale from a real concentration camp.

Tragedy and triumph vie for the upper hand during this tale from a real concentration camp.
By MICHAEL McGOWAN
SPECIAL PROJECTS EDITOR
YOUNGSTOWN -- Sometimes, it just takes awhile for a story to be told.
The elements may be sitting there, awaiting discovery by an enterprising soul. The drama is obvious. The tragedy is real, as is the heroism.
But the story was never told.
J.E. Ballantyne Jr. is the benificiary of one such story, a little gem that simply demanded attention. The only problem was that it was buried in some archives, distilled to a few pages by one of the people who lived through the events.
Twice, it had been published, but in dusty historical texts where few had the chance to see it.
All the story needed was for Ballantyne to find it as he was researching material for a production of "The Secret Annex." And find it he did, although it was 60 years after the fact.
The brief treatise he found was "the autobiography of the lead character" in a new play that will be produced at The Oakland Center for the Arts beginning Friday.
In "Block 5," Ballantyne found the outline for a play, one that included a number of mysteries, but more importantly a number of lessons about human frailities and triumphs.
"Block 5," as Ballantyne describes it, was a part of Mauthausen Concentration Camp during World War II. Until the arrival of a British POW, the block was occupied solely by seven Jewish males, a radical departure for the Nazis, because all the other blocks were jammed full of detainees.
Once he stumbled across this autobiography, Ballantyne couldn't resist probing for more information. Why only seven men in Block 5? Why a British POW in with the detainees? Why? Why? Why?
Research
The questions mounted, but the evidence was sparse.
Eventually, Ballantyne was able to determine the truth of the story, because many elements were confirmed in Holocaust records. But many facts were gone with the passage of time. It turns out the Nazis destroyed records at Mauthausen, leaving only bodies and barracks behind.
Ballantyne's challenge was to bring that story to life, to flesh out the bare-bones details, to see what happened to the men of Block 5.
To do so, he had to figure out "how these guys reacted to their situation, how they looked at life, their vision of where they're going."
Working out such a mystery, both psychological and physical, required back stories for all the men. So, Ballantyne set about researching what kinds of lives these men had pre-Holocaust. Were they bakers? Tailors? Bankers? Just what did they do? What did they know? And how did they feel about being trapped in a Nazi concentration camp, cut off even from other Jews?
The lens through which we get to see the drama is Lt. Cartier, the British officer who was thrown into this group of men, for a purpose even he does not know.
As the play develops, Ballantyne said, the prisoners' attitudes toward one another shifts and shifts again.
"There are some very emotional scenes" with these men, Ballantyne said. "I tried to steer away from clich & eacute;s. This is a unique situation, and we still don't know why the Nazis did what they did."
The play also contains violence, from a slap across the face to a full-blown fight, Ballantyne said.
In recreating the atmosphere of a block of prisoners, Ballantyne had to think like them. "There were so many rumors," he said. "What do you believe? Is one of the prisoners an informant? Who do you trust?"
Ultimately, the men must work out all their questions, all their worries, as they face whatever their fate will be.
We do find out some historical facts about Mauthausen:
UPrisoners worked a rock quarry.
UWeak prisoners were shot or stoned to death.
USome simply jumped to their deaths rather than face the prospect of another day lifting boulders.
But we follow it all through the lives of a handful of characters. Besides the British officer, there's a member of the Resistance, a father-and-son duo, and other men who were all dragged into the block, left with just the clothes they were wearing.
"Block 5" is a drama, but Block 5 was real.
Real men.
Real blood.
Real tears.
Real lives.
The story of these seven Jews and one Brit might have been lost in some dusty archive. But somebody did see the evidence, did take it to heart and did do something about it.