Our Class and the Reckoning of Polish Memory

“It was visceral for me,” said a scarf-wearing audience member at the talkback for Our Class at the Classic Stage Company. Lurched forward in his chair, his hands gestured with frantic animation as he explained how he had wanted to jump over the three rows of seats to punch the actors in the face. 

The gentleman’s outburst captured the raw and unsettling power of Tadeusz Slobodzianek’s Our Class, a play depicting the terrors and aftermath of the 1941 Jedwabne pogrom in which Polish villagers massacred their Jewish neighbors. Slobodzianek’s work drew inspiration from Jan Gross’ book Neighbors, published in 2000, which documented this Polish brutality at Jedwabne for the first time. Our Class delivers the heavy subject matter unflinchingly, revealing horrifying truths about prejudice, betrayal, and collective memory. History teacher Robert Sandler’s Jewish History class went to see Igor Golyak’s production on October 30 at the Classic Stage Company. 

The play opens on “Lesson One” with a group of Polish children in a classroom, five Jewish and five Catholic. A massive blackboard serves as the back wall of the stage, where a man is chalking in the name of each character followed by the years of their birth and death. Playing the roles of children, the adult cast delivers these opening scenes vibrantly as they depict the innocent relationships of the characters. Rysiek (José Espinosa) sends a love poem to Dora (Gus Birney), and his classmates tease him. Two others, Menachem (Andrey Burkovskiy) and Zocha (Tess Goldwyn), go to the movies together. The characters are neighbors and classmates—some seemingly inseparable—and they dream of futures together.

The closeness of the students is mirrored in the staging, which begins with the characters lined up tightly, some of them interlinked, across a row of chairs. The small, close quarters of the Lynn F. Angelson Theater magnify this intimacy—the theater does not have a raised stage, but rather an arena-style setup with the stage floor in the center and audience members surrounding it on three sides. This layout collapses the distance between actors and audience, making it nearly impossible to feel removed from the action. In some scenes, characters step almost within arm's reach, creating a tension that mirrors the emotional proximity—and eventual rift—between the characters themselves.

But this closeness gives way. Childhood rivalries start to calcify into acts of violence—the Jewish students are cast to the back of the classroom when it’s time for prayer, and Zygmunt (Elan Zafir) beats up his friend Menachem for his bicycle. When the war breaks out, anti-Semitic propaganda spreads, associating Jews with communism and stoking distrust. The classmates are divided into perpetrators and victims. Zygmunt, who once traded jokes with his Jewish friends, becomes a murderous antagonist. The tone of the play shifts when Jewish Jakub Katz (Stephen Ochsner) hangs from a ladder while Zygmunt and his former classmates accuse him of conspiring with communists. The stigmatization strips him of his humanity in their eyes, and Jakub dies because of it.

Golyak lends immediacy to the piece through layered, impactful scenes, not flaunting the horror of the subject matter with excessively gruesome detail. He does not censor the material; he includes murders, rape, and antisemitic language. Instead, he finds a balance, allowing the violence to pervade the audience’s consciousness without feeling exploitative through complex staging and the actors’ nuanced performances. Scenes are developed to their totality, and they are loaded with impact.

One of these punching scenes is the burning of the barn. It’s a true story; 340 Jewish Poles were rounded up and locked in a barn by their Polish neighbors and set on fire. The three perpetrators of the massacre—Zygmunt, Rysiek, and Heniek (Will Manning)—draw childlike and stereotypically Jewish faces on white balloons, which are tied to pens and dropped from the balcony to the stage floor. Dora is one of the people being massacred in the barn, and she frantically runs around cutting the strings of the balloons until they pop at the stage ceiling. She finally cuts the balloon that represents her own symbolic life. As the barn burns, the finality of Dora’s fate, and of all the others, hangs in the air, encapsulating the destruction of all that once was whole and hopeful.

 Not all the Jews are killed. Rachelka (Alexandra Silber) survives the massacre by hiding. Her former classmate Władek (Sasha Roiz) offers to save her if she converts to Christianity and takes the name Marianna. The three murderers support Władek, helping Marianna with her Catholic lessons. But the hypocrisy is staggering—one even invokes the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” Marianna has lost nearly all her classmates to the same individuals now wielding moral judgments over her. At the wedding, the murderers participate in the celebration, raising toasts and presenting gifts—a silver plate, a sugar bowl, and several menorahs. The items, which were looted from the slaughtered Jewish families, are arranged around Marianna as she lies on the banquet table draped in a white cloth. Her face bears her terror—painted with smeared lipstick, she attempts a smile, but her eyes are wide and impersonal. Eventually, she cuts her own white balloon, signaling the loss of her soul even if her physical body is preserved. Silber’s performance here was striking and unforgettable. 

The second act comes after most of the destruction, presenting the lives of the surviving characters in the decades after the massacre. The horrors of Jedwabne leave an indelible mark on both the victims and the perpetrators. Some seek redemption; others continue to bury the truth. Golyak brings to the forefront the difficult reality of Polish remembrance. 

The Polish government has made apologies; however, because Poles were the main perpetrators of the Jedwabne Pogrom, the story challenges the widely accepted Polish narrative of the Holocaust. The events remain a topic of contention among Polish civilians. Our Class shows these issues as intimately personal, feeding on the previous closeness of these former friends as they succumb to evils. They must go on to live their lives in a world forever altered by their actions. By immersing the audience in the intimate, raw, and often painful experiences of these characters, Our Class demands that the cycle of remembrance and reckoning be ongoing, uncomfortable, and unavoidable.