Playwright Michael London presents two readings of his new play, Those English Girls — 6:30 p.m., Thursday, June 25 at Wright Memorial Public Library in Oakwood, and 6:30 p.m., Wednesday, July 1 at the Boonshoft Center for Jewish Culture and Education in Centerville.

Through their love of attending operas in Austria and Germany, English sisters Ida and Louise Cook helped 29 Jews escape the Nazis in the lead-up to World War II.

Those English Girls completes London’s Resilience Trilogy series of Holocaust-related plays.

The first is Anschel, based on the book Anschel’s Story by Renate Frydman about her late husband Charlie Frydman’s survival in Nazi-occupied Poland as a slave laborer and then as a partisan fighter when he was a youth.

The second, Varian, focuses on American writer and editor Varian Fry’s time in Vichy France during World War II. There, Fry helped rescue anti-Nazis and Jews, including artists Marc Chagall and Max Ernst, writer and poet André Breton, and philosopher Hannah Arendt.

The development process for The English Girls is sponsored by the Dayton Holocaust Resource Center with a grant from the Montgomery County Arts District through Culture Works.

Wright Memorial Public Library is located at 1776 Far Hills Ave.

Registration is required for the reading at the Boonshoft CJCE, 525 Versailles Dr., at daytonholocaustresourcecenter@gmail.com.

— Marshall Weiss

To read the complete July 2026 Dayton Jewish Observer, click here.