Naomi Patz and her husband, Rabbi Norman Patz, have co-produced “The Last Cyclist,” the filmed performance of Naomi’s reconstruction and reimagining of a dark comedy originally written and rehearsed in 1944 in the Nazi concentration camp Terezín. The film, which premiered in February 2020 in the Mene Tekel Film Festival in Prague, won awards at film
festivals in New York and in Israel.
The original script, by the 27-year-old playwright Karel Švenk, was banned following its dress rehearsal: its anti-Nazi allegory was too explicit. The manuscript was lost when Svenk was sent to his death in April 1945. Over the years despite having acquired almost
mythic status among survivors, “The Last Cyclist” was virtually forgotten.
Naomi Patz learned of the play’s powerful impact on the Terezin camp inmates and was deeply moved. Satirizing Nazism, Švenk had created a scenario in which bicyclists are blamed for all of society’s ills. Naomi recreated this bitter
satire based on everything she could find about the original, especially by the cast’s sole survivor.
Svenk’s play was an absurdist comedy originally written to entertain the prisoners in Terezín. Similarly, Naomi’s version of “The Last Cyclist” – a laugh-out-loud comedy – subversively addresses the bigotry,
bullying and resurgence of antisemitism prevalent in our own society.
