In 2006, Yael Cramsky traveled with her father to his hometown of Pinsk, Belarus, from which he had been expelled in 1941. For her father, it was the first time he had returned to the town of his birth. For Cramsky, it was the first time she confronted the truth he had concealed throughout his life. She documented their entire journey to Pinsk. Several years later, she decided to explore the subject of refugees during the Second World War.

Passport brings together three distinct types of texts from different sources, edited and adapted for the stage by Cramsky. The production examines the concept of home through the existential struggles of refugees during the Second World War.

The letters featured in the production are taken from The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin and Gershom Scholem (1982). Benjamin and Scholem had been close friends since their university days in Berlin in 1915. Their correspondence explores the meaning of home, the experience of being forced to abandon it, and Benjamin's attempts to rebuild his life as a refugee across Europe. Scholem describes life in Palestine during that period and the many refugees arriving from Europe. He doubts that Benjamin would be able to integrate into life in Palestine, given his deep roots in German culture.

Walter Benjamin took his own life in 1940 in the town of Portbou, on the French-Spanish border. Some believe that Scholem published their correspondence as a form of public self-examination, in response to claims that he might have prevented Benjamin's suicide had he persuaded him to immigrate to Palestine.

Bertolt Brecht's Refugee Dialogues, written in 1940 during his exile in Finland, follows two German refugees who meet at a railway station in Helsinki, where they have sought refuge. They discuss the state of the world and their own circumstances within it. In a situation where they have lost everything, thoughts and words become their means of survival. They cling to each other's ideas in order to endure. Their conversations are filled with humor and wit, born out of the catastrophic circumstances of two homeless men who have lost their identities.

Additional texts are drawn from testimonies collected by Cramsky from her father, recounting the years between 1941 and 1949, when he lived as a war refugee across Europe before immigrating to Israel in 1949.

The dialogue between these different forms of writing creates a distinctive verbal rhythm, as though assembling the pieces of a puzzle into a complete musical composition. The text becomes a musical instrument, its strings played by the actor.

The production takes place inside an enormous sandbox. This image emerges from a historical reality that surpassed all imagination, revealing the tension between a playground and a mass grave.

The inconceivable reality of a person being expelled from their home and homeland because of their identity or beliefs is reflected in the theatrical language of the production. The alienation and tension created between the performers mirror society's indifference toward those who have been deprived of a home.

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