The University of Southern Maine will show the first English-language performance of Germaine Tillion’s Holocaust operetta “In The Underworld” this month.

Students in the university’s theatre department will perform the operetta. The performance runs from April 18 to 27 at the university’s Gorham campus.

Tillion, a French ethnographer, wrote the script while imprisoned in a World War II concentration camp for women. She was released from the camp in 1945. A fellow prisoner smuggled the script out of the camp and later returned it to her.

University officials say the translators of the operetta will attend the April 19 performance for a discussion with the audience.

The operetta was first produced in France in 2007. Tillion died in 2008 at 100.