The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust by Grzegorz Niziołek (review)

Originally published in Poland in 2013, Grzegorz Niziołek's The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust was much anticipated by Polish-speaking scholars, particularly in light of Niziołek's previous writing on the topic and the fact that it was only the second major publication to analyze the complex representation (and its lack) of the Holocaust in Polish theatre. (My 2012 book, The Post-traumatic Theatre of Grotowski and Kantor, was published a year earlier.) Available now in English, the book offers broad and thoughtful engagement with a challenging topic: How did postwar Polish theatre respond to the trauma of the Holocaust, Niziołek asks—especially, how did it respond to the relationship between Jewish suffering and Polish witnessing? Analyzing the works of Grotowski, Kantor, Wajda, and Słobodzianek, among others, Niziołek draws a number of interconnected conclusions about the aftermath of trauma; construction of Polish identity; and practices of denial, forgetting, and postmemory that took place in Polish theatre following the war.

The book is structured on the premise developed by Polish Jewish sociologist Zygmunt Bauman in his book Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), in which he argues (following Adorno) that the Holocaust was as much "the defeat of modernizing social projects" as the product of the rationalism and progressivism that dominated Western culture from the Enlightenment. Theatre, Niziołek notes, was part of that equation: "Must not forms of theatre originating in Enlightenment educational projects and Romantic national ideologies (as well as procedures created within this framework) become, by their very nature, instruments for practicing defensive strategies, both social and individual, when faced by an experience such as the Holocaust?" (1). This disjunction between the premise of the Enlightenment project and the Holocaust was the source of the complex and often contradictory social and cultural practices that dominated Polish theatre.

In Part 1, "The Holocaust and the Theatre," Niziołek argues that the Holocaust had a multilayered theatrical component. Survival often entailed skillful acting: "masking" one's identity and "blending" into the non-Jewish population. Furthermore, the witnessing of Jewish suffering—the public displays of excessive cruelty and humiliations inflicted by Germans on Polish Jewry in a preamble to the genocide itself—had an element of the libidinal carnivalesque that often blended sadism with laughter. In Niziołek's words, for the co-opted "Polish passers-by, Jewish suffering was purely a spectacle taking place beyond an invisible, impassable boundary line and affecting beings who had already been excluded from the human community and left to their 'fate'" (17). Whether one actively participated in the abominable spectacle or was forced to witness it passively (helping Jews was punishable by death under the Nazi occupation of Poland), Polish society as a whole was thereby implicated in the Holocaust.

This co-optation created a complex response to the events after the war was over. In postwar Poland, Niziołek writes, "it was often unclear who was bearing witness and from what position; it was difficult to grasp the sources of the disturbances to which an act of witness was subjected; and finally—the position of witness underwent gradual denial" (27). This denial, the book argues, was a result of intermingling political and psychological circumstances: an amalgam of anti-Semitism and communist propaganda, reinforced by shame and guilt at having been privy to one of humanity's darkest endeavors; the shame of one's own suffering and humiliations; a desire to spare the victims from further exclusion; and finally the need to forget one's own trauma. As a result, the Holocaust was expunged from collective memory and spoken of in terms that allowed it to be understood by everyone but rarely openly verbalized. Thus theatrical works created during that time engaged in an implicit retelling of the events, with the silent assumption that the situations and circumstances will be recognized by those who witnessed them without having to be explicitly named. It was...