A posthumous story of life, death and the Holocaust.

When Oscar Speace was a child, he knew his mother, Janka, had survived the Holocaust, that she and her family were taken from their home in Romania (then part of Hungary) and sent to Auschwitz and Dachau. She made it through it all, and to America, but never told him the full story.

In adulthood he became an Emmy-winning television producer, writer and director, and wanted to tell her story.

“She still couldn’t talk about it,” he says. “When I asked her a question or two she [would start] crying so hard. I didn’t want to put her through that.”

His mother died in November 1994, when Oscar was 48 years old. A year after her funeral, he discovered that his Aunt Betty had a 60-page letter from his mother to her uncle detailing the story.

There it was. Almost all of the missing pieces. But it was written in her native Hungarian, so Speace found a translator.

“[The translator] would read a page and start to cry,” he says. “Then she would compose herself and tell me what it said, and I would cry.”

He adapted the translated letters into the one-woman play Janka – Speace’s wife, Janice Noga, plays his mother – which has played universities, theaters and museums.

“It’s an average Jewish family taken up into the Holocaust,” Speace says. “She lost 63 members of her family and extended family.”

Despite the heavy subject, Speace says that the play is also filled with funny moments and good times. The set will be sparse, the lighting simple, and the music and sound cues minimal.

Here, the story, deservedly, stands alone in testament.

JANKA plays 7:30pm Fri-Sat and 2:30pm Sun, Feb. 17-26, at Pink Flamingo Theater, 2115 N. Fremont Ave., Monterey. $25. 238-2399, www.brownpapertickets.com