Australian playwright Beth Paterson presents an insightful and eminently watchable one-woman show about identity, trauma and her grandmother

Down in a pock-walled basement room of Edinburgh's Summerhall, a former veterinary school, we find Beth Paterson. She's surrounded by piles of books and boxes, a table and a few chairs. She's here to tell us about her grandmother. “She was a bitch,” Beth says, but she was imprisoned in Auschwitz and the war had not been kind to her.

Following sold-out runs at both the Melbourne and Adelaide Fringe, the Australian playwright and performer makes her international debut this summer in Edinburgh with one-woman show NIUSIA. It begins, as many Aussie productions do, with the Australian Acknowledgement of Country. The reading of this statement, which recognises the indigenous owners of the land, feels especially pertinent to a play about a race that's been repeatedly displaced throughout history.

Niusia – aka Nanna – arrived in Carlton, Melbourne, after the war with her husband and twin daughters. She was once a charming, confident personality with a beautiful singing voice, according to Beth's mother Susie, who we hear speaking in pre-recorded interviews that interject over the soundsystem. Apparently Niusia used to throw doughnut parties in the “days before they had doughnuts in Melbourne” and people flocked to taste them. And she once sold the mayor's wife a dress from her shop in Footscray and steadfastly refused to issue a refund just because the “First Lady of Footscray” saw Dame Edna Everage in the exact same dress. This wasn't the side of Niusia that Beth saw, however, before the anger consumed her grandmother.

Before we get too far in, Beth offers a trigger warning. This is a show about the Holocaust, after all, and the playwright intends to delve into all the troubling truths that her family has kept secret for so long – encouraged by her mother, of course. “Openess is my ethic,” Susie says through the speaker.

As the scenes shift, Beth takes on the role of her grandmother at various points in her life, seamlessly morphing into character to give the stories vibrancy. “I said my Nanna was a bitch and I stand by that,” she says. “I didn't get her vivaciousness … I got the bitter [side].” She starts throwing the books and boxes around in a physical representation of what her mother called Niusia's “black rage”. How did get it so severe? We learn that Niusia was studying medicine by correspondence from Italy, as she wasn't allowed to learn in her native Poland, when she was interned at Auschwitz. Because of her education, she was set to work in the camp hospital. This meant that she was able to smuggle out medication to help fellow inmates, but she was also forced to assist Josef Mengele, the ‘Angel of Death’. She cared for the Jews he ran cruel and heinous experiments on.

Niusia survived the war, but the traumas survived her. “The concentration camp made her very angry at God and Judaism,” says Beth, and the culture and traditions didn't pass down through the family. In doing this play, she describes the imposter syndrome she felt in attempting to reconnect with her Jewish heritage. “I read book after book,” she explains, trying to discover her own Jewish history. The closest she'd been to Judaism previously, was asking her mum to write notes to her anglican school so she could get out of the weekly church service. Quick lines of humour like this are interwoven throughout the show. “It's ok to laugh,” Beth says after relaying a joke her cousin made about arses shvitzing. It offers a welcome chink of light relief to an overall dark topic. For NIUSIA isn't simply a show about a Nanna. It's part history lesson, part deep-dive into a fascinating family story of survival, and it's all told with heart, playfulness and sensitivity.

By Danielle Goldstein

NIUSIA runs until Monday 25 August. 1.20pm. £17, £14.50 concs. Former Womens Locker Room @ Summerhall, EH9 1PL. edfringe.com/tickets/whats-on/niusia