Beth Paterson’s award-winning one-woman show explores family history, cultural disconnection, and the complex legacy of Holocaust survival
When Beth Paterson ticked the “culturally and linguistically diverse” box on a grant application for her show about her Jewish grandmother, she felt like an impostor. “The first time I claimed being Jewish was on an application form,” she tells me, laughing. “I had this great big impostor syndrome about whether I felt comfortable ticking that box or not.”
This moment of cultural uncertainty forms the emotional foundation of NIUSIA, Paterson’s critically acclaimed one-woman show making its international debut at Edinburgh Fringe this summer after sell-out seasons in Australia. The production, which weaves together cabaret, spoken word, and verbatim testimony, explores her relationship with her grandmother Niusia – a Holocaust survivor, savvy businesswoman, charismatic entertainer, and, in Paterson’s own unfiltered words, “a bitch.”
“I remember playing a Patti LuPone cabaret song to my mother – a spoof of Edith Piaf’s ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’ called ‘I Regret Everything’ – and we both laughed until we cried,” Paterson recalls. “Everything about it was like my grandmother: the cherished woe, the laundry list of wrongdoings. And I was struck by how disjointed my memories of her were.”
This dissonance – reconciling the heroic survivor who saved lives in Auschwitz with the difficult grandmother Paterson knew – became the catalyst for a theatrical investigation that began in 2019. “I couldn’t quite piece them all together,” she explains. “The work became a piece of almost investigation initially to try and understand who this woman was.”
As we mark 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz with nearly no survivors remaining, NIUSIA asks profound questions about memory, responsibility, and how we honor complex truths. The show’s set, consisting of archive boxes and scattered books, physically represents the fragmented nature of cultural inheritance and the archaeological process of excavating family history.
“Memory is a living, breathing thing,” Paterson emphasises. “Memory is for the living, not for the dead. So it’s about interrogating what onward role this has and how I want to participate in the maintenance or keeping alive of these stories.”
The performance unfolds as a journey of discovery, with Paterson embodying herself, her mother, and her grandmother across different time periods. The audience witnesses her uncover painful truths about her grandmother’s past – including the revelation that Niusia was forced to be one of Josef Mengele’s nurses in Auschwitz, a fact that even some family members didn’t know until they saw the show.
“One of my cousins came to see the work and he didn’t know something crucial about my grandmother,” Paterson shares. “He sat in the audience bank, surrounded by a room full of strangers, and learned this earth-shattering fact about his own grandmother. That speaks so strongly to the pervasive nature of silence and shame that often exists around these sorts of narratives.”
NIUSIA pushes back against cancel culture’s binary thinking, insisting that multiple conflicting truths can coexist. Your grandmother can have been both a Holocaust hero and a difficult person. Personal memory and collective memory can seesaw within the same story. And the show itself serves as a powerful rebuke to the idea that discussing uncomfortable family truths dishonors their memory.
For Paterson, who grew up disconnected from Jewish community and traditions, creating NIUSIA has transformed her relationship with her cultural identity. “Seven or eight years ago, if you’d asked ‘you’re Jewish, Beth?’ I’d be like, ‘I mean, I guess I am.’ Now I’ve definitely started claiming my Jewishness. I’ve been attending and participating in various activist Jewish spaces that I feel aligned with.”
What makes NIUSIA particularly remarkable is how it transcends its specific context to speak to universal experiences of cultural disconnection and inheritance. After performances, audience members regularly approach Paterson to share their own stories of difficult grandparents, lost histories, and the hunger to reconnect with cultural roots.
“My favourite part of the show is after,” she says. “People come up and share with me their iterations of how they saw themselves on stage. Whether they had a terror of a grandmother, or older women realizing they’re the sole keepers of family stories these days, or young people being like ‘I should have my grandparent for tea.’ People being driven to action to wonder, ‘I am Italian Australian or Turkish Australian – what does that mean to me?’”
For all its exploration of trauma, the production isn’t solemn – quite the opposite. “My favourite element of the show is probably how much humour there is in it,” Paterson notes. “People are often taken by surprise.”
That balance of darkness and light, of painful history and loving celebration, makes NIUSIA not just a personal reckoning but a universal invitation to examine our own relationships with the past. In a time of rising antisemitism and historical erasure, Paterson’s work offers a nuanced template for how we might hold multiple truths simultaneously – honoring survival while acknowledging harm, celebrating heritage while questioning the silences within it.
“The Holocaust narrative and memorial that lives in my work is full of so much humour,” she reflects. “I poke holes in my grandma all the time with so much love while also holding how remarkable she was. The responsibility I feel is that it is remembered to make sure it’s never again for anybody.”
NIUSIA runs at Summerhall (Former Women’s Locker Room) from July 31st to August 25th (not 11th, 18th) at 13:20. Tickets available from www.summerhallarts.co.uk