“How can neighbors turn on neighbors?” Descendants of a 1941 pogrom debate the answer

By Samuel Eli Shepherd
October 25, 2024

They start out as friends in the same class, until hatred enters the curriculum.

Ten students – five Catholic, five Jewish – begin the night singing Yiddish songs and play soccer. But a few lessons later, the Catholic students have tortured and murdered their Jewish classmates. The remaining Jews in the students’ village have either converted, fled or been rounded up and burned alive.

A revival of Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s play Our Class, now playing at the Lynn F Angelson Theatre in New York, examines how ordinary young people in a small Polish village eventually became implicated in one of the worst antisemitic pogroms in the country’s history. And it actually happened. 

In 1941, Catholic residents of the Polish village of Jedwabne forced every Jewish resident into a barn and set it on fire. An estimated 1,600 Jews — the entire Jedwabne Jewish community — were killed in the attack. 

“Twenty-six cousins of mine were killed in Jedwabne,” said lawyer Ty Rogers, speaking onstage after the play’s Wednesday night performance. Rogers was one of three descendants of the Jedwabne pogrom victims who spoke at a recent talkback after the show.

Rogers discovered his grandfather’s connection to Jedwabne as a teenager. He traveled to Poland in 1985 as a college exchange student to learn more, riding a train six hours across the country to Jedwabne. Rogers remembered seeing how memorials of the massacre still absolved the Catholic Polish community of blame.

Rogers recalled an icy interaction with a Catholic piano player at church when he mentioned his Jewish heritage. “We went to the site of the barn where there was a monument that blamed it on the Nazis, not the townspeople,” said Rogers.

As in the play, news of the pogrom was suppressed for years in Poland. Historian Jan T. Gross’s 2000 book Neighbors became the subject of a national controversy in Poland for asserting that ordinary Poles, not the occupying Nazi German powers, committed antisemitic atrocities during the Holocaust. 

Since the book’s publication, however, the government of Poland has started taking steps towards acknowledging the horrors of Jedwabne and other, similar Holocaust-era pogroms, according to the panelists. Rabbi Lester Miller, the son-in-law of Rabbi Jacob Baker (who is the inspiration for the play’s protagonist, Abram) spoke during the panel about a visit he and Baker took to Poland in 2001.

Miller went with Baker to a reconciliation ceremony of nearly 60,000 people, including Poland’s president. Baker was received the Jan Karski award: Poland’s highest honor. Miller said he still remembers a line from Rabbi Baker’s speech: “If you let hate grow, it’s going to destroy the world. 

More recent right-wing governments in Poland have since started denying Polish citizens’ involvement in Holocaust-era atrocities. But Miller said that with a new regime – and with more people watching stories like Our Class – hopefully reconciliation in Poland can still occur.

“Mandela always said that for reconciliation to take place, you have to have truth,” said Miller, who is South African and protested the apartheid regime in his youth. “Truth and reconciliation come together.”

Other members of the panel commented on how the play felt poignant amidst current geopolitics.

“We are not just watching this at any time,” added Scott Richman, New York regional director of the Anti-Defamation League, which organized the panel. “We are watching this in the post-10/7 world.” 

Richman compared the Jedwabne pogrom to the Oct. 7 Hamas attack on southern Israel, in which Hamas militants burnt entire families alive in kibbutzim. “We see the uncanny resemblance,” Richman said.

Audience member Penny Peters interpreted the play more broadly. She lost two grandparents herself in the pogrom, and she saw the play as a parable about how polarization and dehumanization of any group can lead to violence.

“It has opened my eyes to what’s going on in our country in a new way,” Peters told the panel members. 

Peters pointed to the play’s second act, which followed the surviving classmates as they rebuilt their lives after the Nazi regime’s fall. Many of the Catholic Poles who participated in the massacre often retroactively justified their actions by saying “What else could I do?” 

“There are lessons here in how to identify your own value system and stick with it, and how dangerous it is when you go along with the crowd,” Peters told me after the show.

Igor Golyak, the director of the revival, said the story ultimately conveys how ordinary people can be roped into committing evil acts – a lesson that, as a father of two Jewish children, he thinks about constantly. 

“For me it’s a play not about what happened,” said Golyak. “For me it’s a play about what’s going to happen.”

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