If you are in NYC or plan to be visiting soon, I urge you to witness a major theatrical event—the searing and profoundly memorable play Our Class, now playing at Classic Stage Company 136 East 13th Street through Nov. 3rd.
The pivotal moment of this in-your-face, sometimes shocking, and brutal tour de force is the massacre of pretty much the entire Jewish community of Jedwabne, Poland, in a horrific pogrom that took place on July 10th, 1941.
I am inextricably connected to this hideous event as all my Polish Jewish family on my mother's side then living in Jedwabne were rounded up by their Catholic Polish neighbors and locked in a wooden barn and incinerated there.
This story was suppressed for years in Poland. Still, a few Jewish people who managed to escape the barn memorialized this tragedy in a Yizkor Book (Memory Book) published in Israel, which included the names of all the victims—including my mother's original family name of Piekarski, which chillingly is invoked in this play—and which preserved the memory of this hideous event over the years among the relatives of the annihilated Jewish community scattered all over the world.
I first heard about Jedwabne* in whispers from my mother after she read excerpts from the Anne Frank Diary in Life Magazine in August 1958, when it was published in the US.
When she finished reading excerpts to me and my siblings, I asked her:
"What happened to our relatives in Poland?"
"They were burned to death in a barn along with the entire Jewish community of Jedwabne."
Despite my young age, even I quickly did the math and was shocked to realize that this tragedy had taken place a mere 17 years ago—ONLY YESTERDAY—and I shuddered involuntarily.
It's all here in a tumultuous, nearly 3-hour play which, utilizing many avant-garde theatre techniques (projections, animations, mime, sound manipulation, interpolated fragments of Yiddish songs, and repeated breaking of the fourth wall), brings the sweeping panoply of 20th Century Polish history to life in this tale of a mixed elementary school class of Jewish and Catholic children—a class who despite their religious differences exhibit much innocent love towards each other in the first flush of youth—and how the boys and girls of the class are torn apart when History tramples over them in the form of militant Polish nationalism and the advent of two invading armies (Russian and German), which seeps away and rends the entire cultural, political, and moral landscape of their youth asunder.
Directed by Igor Golyak and written by Tadeusz Slobodzianek, this play caused a firestorm of controversy when it premiered in Warsaw in 2009. This was also the case with the publication eight years earlier of Polish historian Prof. Jan Gross's book Neighbors, about the Jedwabne pogrom, which blew the lid off the 60-year hushing-up of details of this atrocity in Poland.
The NYC production, which ran at BAM Fisher Theater in January of this year, boasts an excellent cast highlighted by Gus Birney (pictured above) and Richard Topol. It is not for the faint of heart. This passion play (!) will leave you shaken (and you don't have to be Jewish).
Coming as it does with alarming rising levels of anti-semitism in the world and the two-headed Dogs of War currently howling on the World-Historical stage, it could not be a more timely play. Attendance is mandatory!
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*"Letter from Jedwabne” by Gary Lucas published by The Forward