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Польский театр Катастрофы
Трагедия Холокоста была крайне болезненной темой для Польши после Второй мировой войны. Несмотря на известные факты помощи поляков евреям, большинство польского населения, по мнению автора этой книги, занимало позицию «сторонних наблюдателей» Катастрофы. Такой постыдный опыт было трудно осознать современникам войны и их потомкам, которые охотнее мыслили себя в категориях жертв и героев. Усугубляли проблему и цензурные ограничения, введенные властями коммунистической Польши. Книга Гжегожа Низёлека посвящена истории напряженных отношений, которые связывали тему Катастрофы и польский театр. Критическому анализу в ней подвергается игра, идущая как на сцене, так и за ее пределами, — игра памяти и беспамятства, знания и его отсутствия. Автор тщательно исследует проблему «слепоты» театра по отношению к Катастрофе, но еще больше внимания уделяет примерам, когда драматурги и режиссеры хотя бы подспудно касались этой темы. Именно формы иносказательного разговора о Катастрофе, по мнению исследователя, лежат в основе самых выдающихся явлений польского послевоенного театра, в числе которых спектакли Леона Шиллера, Ежи Гротовского, Юзефа Шайны, Эрвина Аксера, Тадеуша Кантора, Анджея Вайды и др. Гжегож Низёлек — заведующий кафедрой театра и драмы на факультете полонистики Ягеллонского университета в Кракове.
624 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2013
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October 26, 2026
To read The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust is to be stripped of the comforting fiction that the extermination of European Jews unfolded in an invisible void. The Holocaust in Poland was a hyper-visible public spectacle enacted in broad daylight before a society cast as compromised spectators. Niziołek unsparingly dissects how Polish culture erected a "theatre of gapers," transforming the slaughter of neighbours into a performance taking place beyond an impassable boundary line. Those on the sidewalks retreated into the gloom of an imaginary auditorium, endowing the systematic murder before their eyes with a false, fatalistic transcendence. By framing annihilation as a tragedy directed by higher forces—muttering that even God would not intervene—the bystander sought an alibi for passivity. Yet this theatricality was a psychological defense mechanism converting active moral paralysis into the illusion of helplessness, shielding the community from its complicity.
At the heart of this bystander condition lies what Cynthia Ozick fiercely identifies as an "active disinclination to feel". This disinclination is captured in Kazimierz Brandys’s novel Samson, where Jakub Gold, emaciated after months in a cellar, stumbles onto a sunlit Warsaw street in July 1943. To passers-by, Gold is an apparition from an erased world, an actor pushed onto a stage whose presence excites laughter, disgust, and curiosity. Onlookers exchange knowing glances, establishing a conspiracy of distance that transforms human torment into a grotesque street performance. As Niziołek demonstrates, this refusal of empathy borders on Hannah Arendt’s "stupidity"—a stubborn "reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing". When empathy broke down, it mutated into an aggressive hostility justifying the bystander's inaction.
In the aftermath, post-war Polish society engaged in collective denial, attempting to salvage its self-image through historic martyrdom. As Jan Błoński observed in "Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto," Jewish suffering threatened Polish collective identity. Polish culture embraced the role of innocent victim while suppressing the bystander who watched with indifference or secret satisfaction. Kazimierz Wyka brutally exposed the material reality underpinning this denial when he noted in 1945 that while guilt belonged to the Germans, "for us were the keys and the cash"—a shameful evil born of feeding on the remnants of an annihilated people. To avoid confronting this degradation, public discourse constructed elaborate rituals of mourning that glossed over Jewish presence, ensuring that, in the words of critic Leonia Jabłonkówna, "martyrdom leaves no trace".
When literature faltered under censorship, Polish post-war theatre became the unvarnished archive of this repressed past. Rather than offering polite pageants, the stage operated as an affective realm where denied trauma erupted with hallucinatory intensity. Artists witnessing the Shoah used theatrical metonymy to force audiences into uncomfortable confrontations with secret history. A striking precursor appears in the wartime diary of poet Tadeusz Peiper. Wandering in 1939 as an assimilated Jew, Peiper voluntarily chose to "play the Jew" by donning louse-ridden rags and submitting to public humiliation. By stepping into the role assigned by persecutors, Peiper dramatically reversed the gaze, transforming the crowd of gapers into the true spectacle.
This aggressive unsealing of memory reached its provocative heights in the experiments of Jerzy Grotowski and Józef Szajna. In his 1964 Hamlet Study, Grotowski committed an act of bravado by confronting Hamlet—conceived as a squeaky-voiced, Talmud-bearing Jew—with Home Army insurrectionists. As the insurrectionists sang patriotic songs and spat into Hamlet’s face, Grotowski smashed the myth of universal Polish heroism, laying bare the deeply rooted vitality of folk anti-Semitism. In Józef Szajna’s 1962 Forefathers’ Eve, a towering ladder was misread by critics as a spiritual symbol, blinding them to its horizontal reality: railway tracks leading directly to Auschwitz.
No artist dismantled representation more ruthlessly than Tadeusz Kantor, whose Theatre of Death materialized Dori Laub’s concept of an "event without a witness"—a catastrophe so deceptive it obliterated objective comprehension. In 1944, Kantor staged The Return of Odysseus in a Krakow flat, warning attendees that one does not enter theatre with impunity, as a battered figure on the floor gained a face and exposed the threshold between shock and indifference. In works like The Water Hen and Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, Kantor discarded narrative coherence for pure affect. He crammed actors and spectators into wire corrals and turned the cloakroom into a butcher’s shambles, while Mordechaj Gebirtig’s ghetto song Es brent! echoed through the room. Proclaiming "art as terror," Kantor weaponized repetition, forcing audiences to experience panic without catharsis.
In contemporary theatre, memory has moved to public debate, exemplified by Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia. Słobodzianek’s play addresses the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, but risks soothing the audience by fitting atrocity into Romantic topoi and offering a formulaic catharsis where "truth cannot be buried". Warlikowski, by contrast, rejects such moral balancing acts in (A)pollonia. Drawing on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Warlikowski invokes the chilling warning: "you will never be able to say: I shall not kill; the only thing that you can say is: I hope I shall not kill". By placing the audience as helpless bystanders who mask paralysis with judgment, Warlikowski strips away all sentimental justifications. Niziołek’s unblinking thesis ultimately demands that we abandon the comforting lie of collective innocence. The Polish theatre of the Holocaust stands not as a monument to passive grief, but as an unsettling mirror that refuses to let the bystander look away.
At the heart of this bystander condition lies what Cynthia Ozick fiercely identifies as an "active disinclination to feel". This disinclination is captured in Kazimierz Brandys’s novel Samson, where Jakub Gold, emaciated after months in a cellar, stumbles onto a sunlit Warsaw street in July 1943. To passers-by, Gold is an apparition from an erased world, an actor pushed onto a stage whose presence excites laughter, disgust, and curiosity. Onlookers exchange knowing glances, establishing a conspiracy of distance that transforms human torment into a grotesque street performance. As Niziołek demonstrates, this refusal of empathy borders on Hannah Arendt’s "stupidity"—a stubborn "reluctance to ever imagine what the other person is experiencing". When empathy broke down, it mutated into an aggressive hostility justifying the bystander's inaction.
In the aftermath, post-war Polish society engaged in collective denial, attempting to salvage its self-image through historic martyrdom. As Jan Błoński observed in "Poor Poles Look at the Ghetto," Jewish suffering threatened Polish collective identity. Polish culture embraced the role of innocent victim while suppressing the bystander who watched with indifference or secret satisfaction. Kazimierz Wyka brutally exposed the material reality underpinning this denial when he noted in 1945 that while guilt belonged to the Germans, "for us were the keys and the cash"—a shameful evil born of feeding on the remnants of an annihilated people. To avoid confronting this degradation, public discourse constructed elaborate rituals of mourning that glossed over Jewish presence, ensuring that, in the words of critic Leonia Jabłonkówna, "martyrdom leaves no trace".
When literature faltered under censorship, Polish post-war theatre became the unvarnished archive of this repressed past. Rather than offering polite pageants, the stage operated as an affective realm where denied trauma erupted with hallucinatory intensity. Artists witnessing the Shoah used theatrical metonymy to force audiences into uncomfortable confrontations with secret history. A striking precursor appears in the wartime diary of poet Tadeusz Peiper. Wandering in 1939 as an assimilated Jew, Peiper voluntarily chose to "play the Jew" by donning louse-ridden rags and submitting to public humiliation. By stepping into the role assigned by persecutors, Peiper dramatically reversed the gaze, transforming the crowd of gapers into the true spectacle.
This aggressive unsealing of memory reached its provocative heights in the experiments of Jerzy Grotowski and Józef Szajna. In his 1964 Hamlet Study, Grotowski committed an act of bravado by confronting Hamlet—conceived as a squeaky-voiced, Talmud-bearing Jew—with Home Army insurrectionists. As the insurrectionists sang patriotic songs and spat into Hamlet’s face, Grotowski smashed the myth of universal Polish heroism, laying bare the deeply rooted vitality of folk anti-Semitism. In Józef Szajna’s 1962 Forefathers’ Eve, a towering ladder was misread by critics as a spiritual symbol, blinding them to its horizontal reality: railway tracks leading directly to Auschwitz.
No artist dismantled representation more ruthlessly than Tadeusz Kantor, whose Theatre of Death materialized Dori Laub’s concept of an "event without a witness"—a catastrophe so deceptive it obliterated objective comprehension. In 1944, Kantor staged The Return of Odysseus in a Krakow flat, warning attendees that one does not enter theatre with impunity, as a battered figure on the floor gained a face and exposed the threshold between shock and indifference. In works like The Water Hen and Dainty Shapes and Hairy Apes, Kantor discarded narrative coherence for pure affect. He crammed actors and spectators into wire corrals and turned the cloakroom into a butcher’s shambles, while Mordechaj Gebirtig’s ghetto song Es brent! echoed through the room. Proclaiming "art as terror," Kantor weaponized repetition, forcing audiences to experience panic without catharsis.
In contemporary theatre, memory has moved to public debate, exemplified by Tadeusz Słobodzianek’s Our Class and Krzysztof Warlikowski’s (A)pollonia. Słobodzianek’s play addresses the 1941 pogrom in Jedwabne, but risks soothing the audience by fitting atrocity into Romantic topoi and offering a formulaic catharsis where "truth cannot be buried". Warlikowski, by contrast, rejects such moral balancing acts in (A)pollonia. Drawing on Jonathan Littell’s Les Bienveillantes, Warlikowski invokes the chilling warning: "you will never be able to say: I shall not kill; the only thing that you can say is: I hope I shall not kill". By placing the audience as helpless bystanders who mask paralysis with judgment, Warlikowski strips away all sentimental justifications. Niziołek’s unblinking thesis ultimately demands that we abandon the comforting lie of collective innocence. The Polish theatre of the Holocaust stands not as a monument to passive grief, but as an unsettling mirror that refuses to let the bystander look away.
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