Skip To Content
JEWISH. INDEPENDENT. NONPROFIT.
Theater

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

“Our Class,” produced by the Classic Stage Company, tells the story of a true and timely Holocaust-era atrocity

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 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.”

Gary Lucas, a musician known for his work with Captain Beefheart and Jeff Buckley, mentioned how he had relatives from the mother’s side of his family who were killed in Jedwabne. (He wrote about his visit there for the Forward.)

He also attended the reconciliation ceremony in 2001. Afterwards, he accompanied a Jewish attendant of the ceremony to her family’s former home in the village, which was now occupied by a Catholic couple.

“And they were incredibly sensitive and kind to us,” said Lucas of the Catholic couple. “And I thought there is a hope for reconciliation in this country after all that.”

The cast of Our Class at the Lynn F Angelson Theatre after intermission. Our Class tells the story of a classroom of students in a Polish village that become indoctrinated with hate. Image by

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.”

A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen

I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.

At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse.

Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.

—  Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO

Join our mission to tell the Jewish story fully and fairly.

Republish This Story

Please read before republishing

We’re happy to make this story available to republish for free, unless it originated with JTA, Haaretz or another publication (as indicated on the article) and as long as you follow our guidelines. You must credit the Forward, retain our pixel and preserve our canonical link in Google search.  See our full guidelines for more information, and this guide for detail about canonical URLs.

To republish, copy the HTML by clicking on the yellow button to the right; it includes our tracking pixel, all paragraph styles and hyperlinks, the author byline and credit to the Forward. It does not include images; to avoid copyright violations, you must add them manually, following our guidelines. Please email us at [email protected], subject line “republish,” with any questions or to let us know what stories you’re picking up.

We don't support Internet Explorer

Please use Chrome, Safari, Firefox, or Edge to view this site.