"'Stories can die if there is no one to tell them.' The line from Hana's Suitcase, the First Stage Children's Theater 2007 opening production, is revelatory. The story is the life of a 13-year-old Jewish girl and her family; the play tackles the drama and the difficulty inherent in preserving such tragic narratives. Hana's Suitcase deals with hard questions about the Holocaust – specifically, how to present to young people the challenging fact that one and a half million children died...Throughout the play...dark masked figures... illustrate the dreadful days in the camps. As they move silently through the set with bright, blonde Hana, they provide subtle references to the underlying gravity of her circumstances... Ultimately this First Stage production belongs to Hana Brady, giving an important voice to all children, past and present, on stage and off."

"Sometimes it takes a single face to help us understand an enormous tragedy. Hana's Suitcase, the powerful play that opened at First Stage Children's Theater last weekend, tells the true story of a Japanese teacher who searched for answers about the fate of a young Czechoslovakian girl imprisoned at the Auschwitz concentration camp during World War II...Emil Sher...populates the Holocaust scenes with masked, nameless characters, dressed in gray tatters, depicting the millions of victims whose stories will never be known. The First Stage production tells the story of Hana's Suitcase with dignity and compassion."

"Early in Hana's Suitcase, a schoolteacher investigating the life-and death-of a 11-year-old Holocaust victim asks: "How much do you tell the children about what happened? How much of the horror do you describe?" Therein lies the central question of this play about the real life of Hana Brady, who perished along with 1.5 million children during the Holocaust... As Hana, Jessica Schmeling looked and acted the role to perfection, her innocent looks and childlike determination to survive contrasting sharply with the horrors of an eleven-year-old walking off the prison train alone, guard dogs barking ferociously, into the eventual death-grip of Auschwitz. "