Rechnitz, by Nobel Prize-winning Austrian playwright Elfriede Jelinek, is a cerebral work examining the silence around an actual event of mind-boggling evil.
In the spring of 1945, with the Russian army only a few miles away, Countess Margit von Battyany hosted a party at her castle in Rechnitz, near the Hungarian border. Aristocrats mixed with SS officers in a night of crazed drinking and debauchery.
At the height of the orgiastic celebrations, 15 of the more senior guests were invited to a barn on the property where almost 200 Jewish prisoners, half-starved and exhausted from forced labor, were held; there, the drunken guests opened fire
