Rudi (Brendan Gall, right) tries to deal with his father's Nazi past in Hannah Moscovitch's hit play East of Berlin. (Cylla von Tiedemann/Tarragon Theatre)

What would you do if you discovered your dad had been an SS doctor in the Nazi death camps? That’s the ugly dilemma faced by Rudi, the young German expatriate at the centre of Hannah Moscovitch’s hit play East of Berlin.

As Holocaust plays go, East of Berlin is unusual in that it focuses on the trauma of the children whose parents were the working parts in the Final Solution. Even more unusual, the play is often disarmingly funny.

Rudi, who has grown up in South America, always assumed his businessman father was just a troop physician in the German army during the Second World War. That is, until Rudi’s teenage friend Hermann inadvertently reveals the truth: The old man was one of the monsters who performed unspeakable medical experiments on the inmates at Auschwitz.

Rudi’s attempts to grapple with this bombshell form the substance of Moscovitch’s play, which premiered to acclaim at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre last season and is back for an encore run this month. As Holocaust plays go, this is an unusual one, focusing as it does on the trauma of the children whose parents were the working parts in that bloody Nazi machine known as the Final Solution. Even more unusual, while East of Berlin is ultimately tragic, at times it’s also disarmingly funny.

“When I first pitched this play to [Tarragon artistic director] Richard Rose, I pitched it as a comedy, believe or not,” says the waifish Moscovitch, currently the it girl of Canadian playwriting. “I was wrong about that, but some of the humour remains. I tend to approach dark topics with humour.”

The young playwright’s witty treatment of heavy subjects first caught the eye of critics and audiences a few years ago, when her one-act shows Essay and The Russian Play were smash successes at Toronto’s indie SummerWorks festival. The first piece dealt with sexism in academe, while the second was a tongue-in-cheek exercise in Slavic gloom set in Stalinist Russia. East of Berlin, Moscovitch’s full-length debut, marks her national breakthrough: Tarragon is touring its production to Vancouver’s Touchstone Theatre and Edmonton’s Theatre Network this winter, and the play was also staged this past fall at Alberta Theatre Projects in Calgary.

Playwright Hannah Moscovitch. (Tarragon Theatre)

Sitting in her Tarragon office, a shoebox space she shares with fellow resident playwright Brendan Gall (who plays Rudi in the show), the 30-year-old Moscovitch sounds apologetic for her youthful audacity. Here she is, writing a play about the Holocaust from the Nazi point of view — and with laughs on top of it. “I thought, God, I don’t know if I have the right to do this,” she admits. “I certainly spent some moments wondering if B’nai Brith was going to burn my house down.”

She needn’t have worried. In East of Berlin, she handles her sensitive material adroitly. The play’s comedy derives mostly from Rudi, a likable, chain-smoking nebbish who tries desperately to mask his despair with quips about Mein Kampf being his childhood bedtime story and other ghoulish Nazi jokes. (“What’s a euphemism for ‘kill’?” he asks at one point. “ ‘Resettle.’ ”) At the same time, his efforts to cope with his father’s past run the gamut from confronting him and shaming him to trying to atone for the man’s sins himself. In the play’s most memorable scenes, Rudi’s desire to make amends becomes confused with love after he meets Sarah (played by Diana Donnelly), a young New York Jew whose mother survived Auschwitz. Their uncertain courtship, freighted with so much historical baggage, is by turns awkward, sexy and bitingly poignant.

Moscovitch says having the son of an SS officer fall in love with a Jewish girl was inspired by the real-life stories collected in a couple of books about the families of Nazi war criminals: Born Guilty by Peter Sichrovsky and Legacy of Silence by Dan Bar-On. Reading those works, she was struck by the way the interview subjects felt guilty for their parents’ crimes and the lengths some went to seek atonement. One man became a rabbi, she notes, while another devoted himself to performing the works of German Jewish poet Heinrich Heine.

“There’s this desire for redemption, for closure or to break with their parents,” Moscovitch says. “A lot of them talk about how they see their parents as strangers. They talk about urinating on their parents’ graves — there’s extreme reactions. And then some defend them absolutely.” Or, as Hermann (Paul Dunn), also the child of a Nazi, puts it to Rudi: “Your father’s a war criminal. It’s going to be like this your whole life. You’re going to spend half your time wanting him to die in a car crash… and the other half scared he’ll get extradited.”

The Ottawa-born Moscovitch, who is half-Jewish, grew up intensely aware of the Holocaust. As a teenager, she participated in the March of the Living, an educational tour of concentration camp sites. After high school, like many an adventurous Jewish kid, she spent some time in Israel working on a kibbutz. But given that none of her work to date has been autobiographical (“That’s just not been my interest”), it’s perhaps not surprising that with East of Berlin she chose to write from inside the skin of an Aryan German.

Her play is riding the crest of a trend. Of the recent spate of Holocaust films, at least three (The Reader, Valkyrie and the forthcoming Good) dramatize the German point of view. Moscovitch has a theory about that. “I wonder if, up until now, it was enough to write the story from the perspective of the survivors and the victims — that was all we could take,” she says. “Now there’s a desire to see who was manning the gas chambers and to understand the psychology of that. Perhaps before, there was too much horror surrounding it because it was so close in time to us. But,” she qualifies, “that might be bullshit.”

Rudi and Sarah (Diana Donnelly), the daughter of a Holocaust survivor, enter into an uneasy relationship in East of Berlin. (Cylla von Tiedemann/Tarragon Theatre)

Following her kibbutz experience, Moscovitch entered the National Theatre School in Montreal, originally to study acting. However, she found she got more satisfaction out of writing. “I really had an urge to have my own voice be part of the creative work I was doing,” she says. “I wanted to have my thoughts and philosophies and ideologies expressed.” Besides, she adds with a smile, “I think I was actually quite a bad actor.”

She moved to Toronto in 2001 and spent a few years waiting tables and paying her dues before her career took off. Now she’s a hot commodity, with a slew of commissions from the Tarragon (where she became a resident writer last year), the Banff Centre, Winnipeg’s Prairie Theatre Exchange and Toronto’s Theatrefront. They continue to reflect her bent for weighty subjects. The play for Banff is about Canada’s military involvement in Afghanistan, inspired by her work on the CBC Radio drama Afghanada. The PTE project, Post Democracy, is a drama set at a world economics summit. “The protagonist is the CEO of a multinational,” she says.

Moscovitch is grateful for the attention she's getting now and anxious not to disappoint. “You spend so long trying to get anybody to give you anything at all,” she says candidly. “And the minute they do, it’s, ‘Oh my God, thank-you!’ And you’re on your hands and knees thanking the Lord.”

East of Berlin runs at Toronto’s Tarragon Theatre to Feb. 8, at Vancouver’s Touchstone Theatre Feb. 18-28 and Edmonton’s Theatre Network March 10-29.

Martin Morrow is the theatre columnist for CBCNews.ca.