'Our Class' at the Wilma (1st review)

Tadeusz Slobodzianek's Our Class follows the lives of ten members of a school class in Jedwabne, Poland, from 1925 into the present. Half are Jews; the others call themselves Poles— meaning that they, being Catholics, are the only true Poles.

Although the children play and joke with each other, incompatibilities exist from the start. During the 1930s, the nation's leaders turn from inclusive to separatist, and local priests voice hostility to Jews. In the classrooms, Catholic prayers are made mandatory while the Jewish kids are dispatched to the rear of the room.

When the Nazi-Soviet pact of 1939 divides Poland between those two powers, tensions escalate. The allegiance of some Jews to the new Communist occupiers drives a further wedge between the former classmates.

When Germany invades Russia in 1941, occupying all of the former Poland, near-anarchy descends on the village. The Catholic community's deep-seated anti-Semitism prompts some villagers to rape, beat and eventually force the Jewish population into a barn, which they burn to the ground. Some 1,600 Jews are burned alive; then the townsmen chop up their bodies with axes.

As one of the few Jewish survivors remarks: "A crowd was standing around laughing and joking as they watched us. I knew them all. They were our neighbors."

Nadir of hypocrisy

One chilling scene, the Catholics Zygmunt and Heniek invade the house of their Jewish classmate Dora, quiet her crying baby and then rape her. Dora and her baby are killed in the burning barn.

The play's second act will reveal that Zygmunt became a business and government leader in postwar Poland, while Heniek became the parish priest. His sermons about obedience to God's laws represent the nadir of hypocrisy.

After the war, the Poles blamed the Nazis for the Jedwabne slaughter (until 2001, a memorial on the site of the barn referred to the massacre as a Nazi war crime). But recent research determined that the crime was perpetrated by the local populace. Poland's president issued an official apology "in my own name, and in the name of those Poles whose conscience is shattered by that crime." But the deputy responsible for the area refused to endorse that apology, insisting: "If you are asking the Polish nation to apologize for the crime made in Jedwabne, you would require the whole Jewish nation to apologize for what some Jewish communists did in Eastern Poland."

Some observers contend that the clash of invading armies caused the murderous behavior of 1941. That's much too exculpatory an explanation, and the playwright Slobodzianek, himself a Polish Catholic, demolishes it.

Stolen silver as wedding gifts

His second act shows how Rachelka survived this violence only by converting to Christianity and entering a loveless marriage to a mill owner who cared for her (although his mother and the local priest boycott the wedding). At a party, classmates gave the couple gifts, some of which were silver stolen from the homes of the murdered Jews.

Zygmunt joins the celebration for his classmates but later betrays Rachelka to the Nazis. The remainder of the play follows each of the survivors. Zygmunt has the gall to beg for funds for a non-existent memorial in a deceitfully heart-tugging letter he writes to a classmate who escaped to America. When Zygmunt is put on trial, he is supported by the frightened Rachelka, now re-named Marianna, who has totally shed her former Jewish identity. She says she never was aware of any anti-Semitism in the town.

The play poses questions about who is heroic: Some Polish Catholics who saved lives didn't necessarily do it for unselfish reasons, nor did their actions lead to happiness.

Logistical problem

In Act Two the characters who murdered Jews return to the stage, physically reacting to the duplicitous explanations by their former classmates. As characters die off, each separately walks into the glass barn where their school "friends" perished.

The biggest problem in the script is that almost all action is described in the past tense, not shown. People stand and tell us what happened. While we wouldn't want to see anyone incinerated on stage, hearing verbal description is insufficiently dramatic. It hasn't been delivered successfully since Sophocles.

One puzzling lapse in the script has one of the Jewish characters, Abram, go to America before 1939, but in a letter to his former classmates he appears not to be aware of the war. In 1941 he writes. "Anyway what's news with you? How's our class getting along? Why doesn't anyone write to me any more?" Even allowing for dramatic irony, this ignorance seems incredible.

Still and all, this was a harrowing and worthwhile theatrical experience. Blanka Zizka's smartly-staged and well-acted production is painful and gripping.

Alan Radway as the rapacious Zygmont, Dan Hodge as the priest and Michael Rubenfeld as Abram were the most outstanding of the cast. The rest were very good too, but it took a while to figure out who was Catholic, especially since the actresses who played the two Jewish women didn't look the part.♦


To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read another commentary by Merilyn Jackson, click here.
To read a response, click here.
To read a related comment by Jim Rutter, click here.