Our Class
Theater Play
19 Sep / 20:00
Where:
- Chamber Theater 55
- Maršala Tita 55/II
- +387 33 550 475
- info@kamerniteatar55.ba
- www.kamerniteatar55.ba
Our Class is based on Neighbors: The Destruction of the Jewish Community in Jedwabne, Poland, by Jan Tomasz Gross, which describes the massacre, on July 10, 1941, of nearly all the Jews, a majority of the inhabitants of Jedwabne, a small town.
Poles in Jedwabne, and in some other villages in the area—not Germans—had killed their Jewish neighbors, which came as great shock, causing much soul-searching in some Poles and much denial in others.
Our Class is not, however, a straightforward adaptation of Neighbors for the stage. Słobodzianek’s play is a work of fiction which draws on several other sources.
The play combines and conflates real-life characters and incidents from Jedwabne and Radziłów, a neighboring village that experienced a similar massacre a few days before the Jedwabne pogrom. It tries to explore not only the event of the slaughter and the motivations of the perpetrators, but also the aftermath: the suppression of the memory of what transpired on that day, a horrible recollection that refuses to go away and lingers in the town, poisoning the lives both of the perpetrators and the survivors.