Scenes from the dark days

After a warm reception, a play about the struggle for survival in the Jewish enclave of wartime Lithuania is now on the second leg of its China tour, Chen Nan reports.

When a children's choir performed the song Sleep Away to the sound of an accordion in a theater in Beijing on Thursday, the audience was transported back to the Jewish settlement of Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, during the darkest days of the Holocaust in World War II.

The song portrays the children of murdered parents being imprisoned in ghettos of the time. With death approaching, they clung together and sang songs of hope.