From The Times
September 11, 2009

How could one half of a community kill the other? A Polish play explores a dark era

John Nathan


History is not dead. It is alive,” says Tadeusz Slobodzianek. We are sitting in a train as it rattles north-east out of Warsaw, talking about the previous day’s ceremony in Gdansk that marked the outbreak of the Second World War, and how Vladimir Putin acknowledged the suffering caused to Poles by the Nazis without recognising the suffering caused to Poles by the Soviet Union. “No one apologised,” observes Slobodzianek.

One of Poland’s leading playwrights, Slobodzianek is the son of a Roman Catholic father and Russian Orthodox mother who, like countless other Poles, were deported by the Soviets to Siberia, where their son was born. Today in Warsaw he runs the Laboratorium Dramatu, a theatre with a reputation for new writing that is the Polish equivalent of the Royal Court in London.

By the time we reach our destination the talk has turned to Polish suffering in the remote northeastern borderlands — the subject of Slobodzianek’s play Our Class, which receives its world premiere later this month at the National Theatre in London.

“This is where they were beaten,” says Slobodzianek, surveying Jedwabne’s main square. From doorways, passing cars and park benches, the 55-year-old playwright is watched by a few of the town’s 2,000 residents. But Slobodzianek, a fearless planet of a man at over 6ft (1.9m), is impervious.

Pronounced Yedvabne, this ghostly, isolated place is one of a handful of torpid towns scattered across the plains of northeast Poland. The nearest city, where Slobodzianek was raised, is Bialystock — yes, the name of Mel Brooks’s hero in The Producers, though in Poland it’s the gateway to a region of vast forests, slow-moving rivers and swamps.

Jedwabne is not mentioned in Slobodzianek’s play, nor the nearby village of Radzilow, but by the time Our Class finishes its London run, both are bound to become more renowned. As will the events that took place there — particularly in Jedwabne, where on July 10, 1941, the town’s Jews were murdered during an eight-hour pogrom that climaxed with almost all those still able to stand being herded into a barn and burnt alive.

There can be no more disturbing subject for a play. But Our Class will resonate for reasons beyond its examination of how half a town ends up murdering the other half. Until 2001, the Jedwabne memorial on the site of the barn referred to the atrocity as yet another Nazi crime. The one at Radzilow, whose Jewish inhabitants were also burnt in a barn, still does. But a reassessment of the massacre, much of it by the Polish-born American historian Jan T. Gross, tells another story — of Catholic Poles killing 1,600 Jewish Poles with hideous cruelty and with little or no encouragement from the Nazis.

Although a subsequent official inquiry confirmed many of Gross’s findings — the number of victims remains in dispute — political lines have been drawn between these opposing versions of Jedwabne’s recent past. As Slobodzianek says, history is alive.

Set between 1925 and 2002, Our Class follows a school class of ten Jewish and Roman Catholic children who grow up together and grow apart during a period when this part of Poland went from independence to repeated occupation — first by the Soviets, then the Nazis, then by the Soviets again.

Against this brutalising backdrop Slobodzianek weaves a tale of Polish-Jewish relations buffeted by communism, nationalism and ultimately destroyed by Nazism and anti-Semitism. The play is fictional, but many of the characters bear similarities to the real-life victims and perpetrators.

An early attempt to stage the play in Warsaw was aborted. But Our Class was never going to be easy to produce in Poland. When, in 2001, a memorial to the Jews of Jedwabne was unveiled and the-then Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski apologised to Jews for the massacre, the gesture was criticised by some Poles, including the priest and the people of Jedwabne who boycotted the ceremony. They founded the Committee to Defend the Good Name of Jedwabne, which is supported by the Polish politician Michal Kaminski, recently appointed, amid accusations of anti-Semitism, as leader of the European Conservative and Reformists Group, which is backed by David Cameron. Never one to back away from a row, Slobodzianek compares the Jedwabne committee to the Ku Klux Klan.

If there is a lesson from Jedwabne, it is that the Holocaust was not only the result of meticulous German planning and high-tech killing, but also in some cases, of communities turning on their neighbours with axes, fence posts and farming equipment. This is why Gross’s book is called Neighbours, a title that brings to mind the cosy Australian soap opera. While anti-Semitism was rife, Poland once had Europe’s biggest Jewish population.



“This square was full of Jewish and Polish traders,” Slobodzianek says. “Think of Bruno Schulz,” he says, recalling the Polish writer whose novel The Street of Crocodiles gives the mundane lives of his fellow citizens in the Polish-Ukrainian town of Drogobych a teeming richness.

“This is where the Jews were made to kneel and pick the weeds out of cobblestones,” Slobodzianek says as he walks towards a grey, two-storey building. “That was the school. When I wrote Our Class, I was thinking of this building.”

There is a remarkable fluidity to the play, on the page at least, as the classmates tell and act out their version of events — as children, adults, and as the dead.

“I hadn’t read a play like it,” says Bijan Sheibani, the director, during a break in rehearsals. “It’s unique in the way the characters listen to their own stories told by others.” Sheibani recalls his own research visit to Jedwabne. “I felt this hostility. One man revved his car at me, a drunk woman shouted in my face, about six people came out of their shops and watched.”

The memorial is on the town’s outskirts. This is the short route that the Jews were made to stagger to the barn. Standing in front of the memorial is a family from Gdansk, 55-year-old Andrey, his 21-year-old daughter Kasia and niece Agnieszka, 19. They are visiting Andrey’s father who lives about 20km away. “He doesn’t like to discuss what happened to the Jews,” Andrey says. “I heard about it and want to get some information,” Kasia says.

On the way back an elderly man is working in his yard. I ask if he is willing to talk about what happened in 1941. He gets straight to the point. “There is no question the Germans are guilty, not the Poles.” He is 70, was born in Jedwabne, and as a boy remembers playing with bullets from an SS officer’s gun. “Gross should change the book,” he says. He points an imaginary gun at me. He says I’m a Pole and he’s a German. He tells me to take the Jews to the barn. “What do you do?” he asks.

Back in the square Slobodzianek stops in front of another memorial near Jedwabne’s huge church. The memorial is dedicated to those who were deported to Siberia by the Soviets and died of hunger and cold. Even though Slobodzianek’s parents were among those deported, the playwright has no respect for the monument. It was, he says, erected in defiance of the new Jewish memorial. “Its message is clear,” he says. “That it is worse to die of cold than of fire.”