Cynthia Dretel is a Ph.D. candidate at the historical musicology department of the Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar, in Germany. She completed her Master of Arts in music history at Indiana University Bloomington, Indiana, USA. Her dissertation uses an interdisciplinary approach to investigate the complexities of ritual and resistance in the music of informal and often satirical theater productions, such as puppet plays, szopki, and Purimspiel by Polish Jewish and Catholic inmates interned in Nazi concentration camps and in Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. During her EHRI fellowship at the Ringelblum Archive in the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, Cynthia will investigate surviving documents on theatre performances for children and examine the entangled history of Polish- and Yiddish-language theatre in Warsaw.