In the years 1943-1944, when the German High Command, despite alarming losses on all fronts, suddenly began to divert, precious fuel supplies, men, building material, and transportation facilities for the mass extermination of over six million European Jews; when, independent of any Nazi blueprints, vicious pogroms broke out everywhere in German-occupied Europe, North Africa, and the Middle East; when the British government found itself spending millions of pounds patrolling the Eastern Mediterranean, preventing escaping Jews from reaching sanctuary in Palestine; when the United States broke off secret negotiations with the Hungarian government and the Swiss Red Cross to save 100,000 Jewish children, who later perished; in the years 1943-1944, thought to be the most disasterous, by many historians, in the Jews’ nearly four-thousand-year-old history, an ancient community performance was being recreated in a small kibbutz in Mandate Palestine.