Poles, Jews and 'Our Class' (3rd comment)

Over the past few months, I've been reading and writing about massacres and holocausts— their aftermath, their mythology, their cover-ups, their truths. My research included an investigation into the background of Our Class, a play that concerns a crime committed 70 years ago in a wretched town in eastern Poland called Jedwabne where perhaps 400 or maybe as many as 1,600 Jews were herded into a barn and burned alive.

My second research project concerned Stella Duffy's historical novel, Actress, Empress, Whore, the latest of many books about the Byzantine Empress Theodora, whose famous speech to her husband Justinian prompted the slaughter of some 30,000 people in Constantinople's Hippodrome during the Nike uprising in 532. That slaughter isn't mentioned in Duffy's novel; no doubt it will figure prominently in Duffy's sequel.

Meanwhile, French activists are calling for their government to open the files on the Paris massacre of 1961, in which anywhere from 40 (the official count) to 300 Algerians were killed in a stadium. Add Rwanda and Kosovo, and clearly there's no end of this subject. Each account comes with its own victim count, counter-account and/or cover-up.

Conflicting accounts

Our Class, the savagely penetrating drama by the Polish Catholic playwright Tadeusz Slobadzianek, lays out the story of the July 10, 1941 Jedwabne massacre with many new facts in addition to those originally unearthed by Agnieszka Arnold in her 1998 documentary, Neighbors.

Another account, called The Legacy of Jedwabne, by Slawomir Grunberg, came out after the commemoration ceremonies and dedication of a new monument on July 10, 2001; it covers then-Polish President Kwasniewski's apology to the Jews, acknowledging the crime in his own name and the name of the Polish people.

Arnold's film inspired further research by the Princeton historian Jan Gross for his 2001 book, also called Neighbors. Gross, himself of Polish extraction, spent many months researching court documents from the Soviet trials of 1949 and 1953 in which the accused of Jedwabne gave conflicting accounts of the incident.

Gross also pored over census records to derive the town's approximate population at the time, and he searched German records for corroboration of the Poles' claim that the Gestapo made them slaughter their neighbors with pickaxes, pitchforks, nail-studded clubs and, more mercifully, knives, before locking them in the barn, pouring kerosene over it and torching it.

How many victims?

It becomes clear to anyone watching these documentaries and reading Gross's book that the few trickling-in Germans had little to do with the crime. Nevertheless, the Polish Catholic church erected a monument to the 1,600 Jews killed "by the Nazis" on that day. That memorial, however specious its claim as to who was to blame, at least establishes a consensus concerning the number of victims.

But the Jedwabne massacre is really a continuing crime, because most residents of that town continue to engage in its cover-up as complicit accomplices. Indeed, those who came forth and testified subsequently had to go into hiding for their own safety.

In fact, the cover-up is global (as Robert Zaller suggests in his BSR review). Some, if not many, of my fellow members of Polonia (the Polish diaspora) still aid, abet and accessorize the massacre with their refusal to examine it honestly.

Canadian Poles react

After Our Class was produced in Toronto, the Canadian Polish Congress circulated a press release contending that Jan Gross's careful research for Neighbors got the death count wrong— and that therefore Neighbors as well as the play it inspired are not based on fact. They maintain that "only" a few hundred were herded into a barn donated by BronisÅ‚aw ÅšleszyÅ„inski, and these were burned to death by "only" about 40 hooligans.

I invite them to watch eyewitness accounts of the townsfolk who confirm that many people in Jedwabne knew in advance what would happen. Some of them tried to warn or even hide the Jews. Many men simply left for the fields early or returned late so as to avoid taking part.

One who was among those the Gestapo forced the next day to bury the dead tells how the barn was prepared to receive its Jewish townspeople: "The floor was covered in fresh straw and sawdust" so it would burn more quickly, and a pit was dug inside to make it easier to bury the dead.

In Poland, President Kwiasniewski has already done the right thing, in 2001. But the Polish church has still not, dragging its feet much in the same way as it has (and still does) on the issue of clerical sexual abuse. Have they not understood their own most fundamental tenet— confession?

The missing church fathers

Those are some of the facts about Jedwabne. But here we are talking about a play, and fact-based theater must turn history into drama. Slobadzianek and Zizka have done so in the most devastating way, allowing both victims and perpetrators to speak to us in the first person.

Was it too much to memorialize the Jedwabne dead in a three-hour ceremony in the rain on Polish TV, for the entire country to see? Not, apparently, for most Poles.

That day I sat in my hotel room in KrakÓ³w, typing everything I saw onto my laptop, never glancing away from the screen. The famous faces that flashed before me included several former architects of Solidarity, Poland's heroic anti-Soviet resistance movement. The late historian Bronislaw Geremek, Poland's foreign minister from 1997 to 2000, sat next to the Jewish Holocaust memorialist Elie Wiesel. Playwright Janusz Glowacki was there. Gross and his wife Irena, who were Solidarity activists while teaching at Yale in the '80s, also attended.

Yet not one official from the Catholic Church was there.

Ignored in Philadelphia

Next question: Is it too much to ask an American audience to sit through three hours of unrelenting buildup to horror and its analytical and political aftermath?

In a talk at the Wilma on September 18, Gross remarked, "A historian can't do what a play can do in taking it to the public." That observation has proven correct. In Poland, Our Class has been running non-stop in multiple cities since it opened. Poles have responded to it with mixed reactions, but at least they're going to see it and arguing about it.

Unfortunately, some Polish Americans, especially those organized in groups around the church and the Congress, perceive Our Class as an attack instead of a way to forge a different future. They are missing an important opportunity.

In Philadelphia, a city with a half-million Polish-Americans and a quarter-million Jews, Gross's questions should take on a special relevance. But unlike Toronto's Polish group, with its reflexive knee-jerk reaction to Our Class, Philadelphia's branch of the Polish American Congress has ignored the Jedwabne issue altogether.

As a Polish American, I know the faces of many of my landsmen. I can tell you that at three performances of Our Class, I didn't see anyone I recognized from the Polish community. Of course, some of them may have attended performances I missed. Still, I wasn't surprised by the absence of Polish faces in the audience.

Jewish complaints

Our Class has also raised questions among Jews. I'm told that as least one Philadelphia Jew wrote a letter to the Wilma complaining that the play paid too much attention to the Poles' suffering.

All of this suggests that Our Class is doing what good theater should do: provoke discussion. (See, also, the dialogue in BSR's Letters section between cast member Michael Rubenfeld and critic Steve Cohen over what a Polish Jew looks like.)

Whatever one's viewpoint, this withering but thoroughly absorbing play flays open the horror of our inhumanity in the most spare and spellbinding way. The fine cast members inhabit their characters with astonishing depth as their alienation from each other becomes painfully palpable.

Zizka's metamorphosis

One other intriguing side effect of Our Class is where it may be taking Blanka Zizka as a director. When I interviewed her in September, Zizka said, "I used to work like this a long time ago, influenced by Grotowski and the Polish theater of the '70s. Then I fell into the system of the American theater— subscription audiences." She spoke of moving in yet another direction, one that would utilize and develop the voices of Philadelphia's abundant acting talent, perhaps even through creation of a loose company.

With Our Class, she has come much closer to her early ideals, her Brechtian training and even to the sensibility of the Polish playwright Tadeusz Kantor, who first exhumed these issues for the post-War Polish public under the Soviets. (The title of Our Class pays homage to Kantor's famous 1975 play, Dead Class.)

Our Class may very well mark a dramatic new beginning for Blanka Zizka, who has already pushed the envelope of Philadelphia theater for more than 30 years. Her former founding partner, Jiri Zizka, has returned to the Czech Republic whence they came in the late '70s, leaving Blanka to run the Wilma Theater alone. She will find no shortage of plays that both enrich and shame us the way Our Class has.♦


To read another review of Our Class by Steve Cohen, click here.
To read another review by Robert Zaller, click here.
To read responses, click here.
To read a related comment by Jim Rutter, click here.