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

Grzegorz Niziołek opens The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust by relating an event from a 1948 novel in which the protagonist, Jakub Gold, is driven by fear from his hiding place in a dark cellar out to a bright, hot summer street in Warsaw. It is as if Jakub had been pushed onto a stage, blinded by the lights, yet still very much aware of his aggressive audience. This moment serves as a theatrical framework “which tries to justify the indifference and shameful behavior of the ‘spectators’” (17). The author further discusses how Raul Hilberg described the experience of the Holocaust as a spectacle that contains three main positions of active and passive participants: perpetrators, victims, and bystanders. In the above example, the Nazi perpetrators are absent, while the victim is spotlighted for the indifferent or hostile witnesses. And while the Polish people could be described as witnesses to the Holocaust, Niziołek prefers the term “bystander,” which Hilberg believed more precisely described the passive witness. This true-life example compels readers to follow Niziołek’s journey as he sets out a broad, thoughtful, and challenging study that answers important historical questions, including: How did post-war Polish theatre respond to the trauma of the Holocaust? And how did theatre respond to the relationship between Jewish suffering and the Polish bystanders?

Niziołek’s two-part book relies on Zygmunt Bauman’s Modernity and the Holocaust (1989), in which Bauman argues that the Holocaust was not an aberration of modernizing social projects, but “an integral part of them, arising out of the same notions and capable of realization on a massive scale, thanks to models of functionality and productivity inculcated in daily social practice” (1). Niziołek applies Bauman’s observations to theatre and asks, “Must not the 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). Through the book, Niziołek argues that Polish theatre based on national ideologies does not allow Polish bystander audiences to empathize with victims, potentially leaving them blindly indifferent to the Holocaust with an inability to recognize their shameful behavior. His book analyzes the conditions causing blindness in the theatre, although as Niziołek optimistically states, “I devote most space to analyzing cases of ‘poor eyesight’ (yet eyesight nevertheless!)” (2). His detailed argument is supported in the book through two sections, with Part 1, “The Holocaust and the Theatre,” examining theatre as an active component of the Holocaust, what the author calls “its co-participant” (6). Part 2, “The Theatre and the Holocaust,” focuses on the theatre’s impact on Holocaust discussion through the examination of specific productions.

In Part 1 Niziołek posits that the Holocaust had multifaceted theatrical components. Victims’ survival required skilled acting to mask their identity and blend into the Polish population. Camp prisoners had to perform characters that met their captors’ expectations. Niziołek also discusses how Nazis forced Jewish victims into cruel and violent performances to create public displays of humiliation and torture that Polish bystanders could passively watch, thus demonstrating elements of the carnivalesque. Niziołek argues that this juxtaposition between cruelty and the carnivalesque exemplifies his use of the “Libidinal economy” (5), which he defines as a kind of instinctive life energy that serves as a transgressive element to facilitate binary oppositions between internal and external experiences, as well as between positive and negative experiences. In essence, the theatricality of the actual Holocaust, which Niziołek details with examples ranging from the banal to the most extreme cruelty, were erased on theatre stages. While the Polish people only witnessed parts of the Holocaust, Niziołek implicates all Poles in these crimes and cites their unwillingness to come to terms with their history. However, Nizio...