This English translation of The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust, Grzegorz Niziołek's immense study in contemporary Polish theatre (published in Polish in 2013) provides an important and thorough accounting of the development of and turning point in cultural representations coming to terms with the Polish positionality of witness during the Holocaust. Niziołek carefully carves out the Polish role of witness to the Holocaust while acknowledging its slippery categorization as a position of trauma that experienced a longtime silencing, shrouded in national defensiveness and unresolved guilt. Niziołek elaborates, “Put in highly simplified terms, we could say that the denial by Polish society of the memory of its own indifference has been decisive in creating tensions in the whole of post-war Polish culture” (3). The productions analyzed in the book all navigate this complex positionality, and Niziołek painstakingly demarcates how they address witnessing while noting the ways in which the broader context of the moment also impacts conceptualizations and audience readings—such as Tadeusz Kantor's 1967 production of Witkiewicz's Kurka Wodna (The Water Hen) occurring just months before the expulsion of the remaining Jews in Poland. Niziołek precisely delineates the limitations of Polish postwar audiences’ reckoning with symbolic (or sometimes explicit) depictions of Holocaust traumas onstage. He carefully reanimates an array of theatrical productions and performatives through description and contextualization, alongside critical reactions to the pieces that often, either through intentional or accidental self-censorship, failed to outright identify Holocaust references or perspectival illuminations.

The book is divided into two main parts, “The Holocaust and the Theatre” and “The Theatre and the Holocaust,” with the former dedicated to articulating the Polish condition with regard to Holocaust history, memory, trauma, and contested positionality, and the latter focusing on Polish performances that examine postwar positionality. In the first half of the book, Niziołek deals with the Holocaust in performative terms, diagnosing the status of “perpetrator-victim-witness” (72) as well as nuancing Polish understanding of wartime trauma through the framework of witnessing. Niziołek does not shy away from pointing toward Polish-specific idiosyncrasies regarding the positionality of witness, the ambiguities of which are in keeping with more recent Polish studies on wartime history (some of which have very publicly drawn political ire, such as Dalej jest noc [Night without End], edited by Jan Grabowski and Barbara Engelking). Niziołek dedicates the first half of the book to painstakingly clarifying the nuances of Polish reckoning with wartime destruction. This part, dense but rewarding, carves out places for wider understanding of the complex topic of Polish postwar positionality in order to clarify how “Polish theatre after 1945 became a venue for the circulation of affects linked to historical experiences and hidden cultural transactions, in which images of the Holocaust were subjected to various procedures of appropriation and deformation” (30). The first chapters of the book operate as a foundation for the second; without understanding Polish wartime and postwar conceptions of identity, the complexities of mnemonic and historical performances illuminated in the remainder of the book would likely be incomprehensible for nonspecialists.

The second half of the book, “The Theatre and the Holocaust,” details performances that explore (to greater or lesser critical success) the nuances of Polish positionality with regard to Holocaust witnessing and memory, while illustrating the broader cultural context of the moment, alongside the intersection of other media. For example, in Chapter 6, “This Shameful Jewish War,” Niziołek details the creation and performance of Stefan Otwinowski's play Wielkanoc (Easter), which premiered at the Łódź Teatr Wojska Polskiego (Polish Army Theatre) in 1946 under the direction of Leon Schiller. Niziołek discusses the play's implicit structural and thematic relationship to nineteenth-century Polish romantic theatre that attempted to bring together Polish and Jewish wartime experience. In Niziołek's theorization, the production tried, though failed, to alter the symbolic framework well established in Polish theatre, vis-à-vis Polish martyrology, with regard to wartime positionality. The narrative depicted the slippage between familiar identity categories to be found in romantic work, such as the philosemitic character who later cowers when confronted by the opportunity to save a Jewish neighbor, or the Jewish prioress (a familiar trope, albeit frequently male in Polish romantic works) whose relative stability in her social role is thrown into disarray when the Occupation occurs. Niziołek further contextualizes the production around the contemporaneous postwar pogroms in Kielce, the coverage of which ran almost concurrent to press about the theatrical performance, as well as the 1948 film Ulica Graniczna (Border Street). The depth of investigation and impressive patchwork of cultural media and associated commentaries carried out in the chapter typifies the extensive work done throughout this book. Other chapters similarly focus on historical contextualization around specific theatrical performances, including Kantor's 1967 Kurka Wodna (Chapter 8, “A Crushed Audience”); Andrzej Wajda's 1977 production of Moczarski's Rozmowy z katem (Conversations with an Executioner) in Chapter 9, “Archive of the Missing Image”; and, from the post-Jedwabne era, Tadeusz Słobodianek's Nasza Klasa (Our Class) and Krzysztof Warlikowski's (A)pollonia in Chapter 10, “Duplicitous Spectator, Helpless Spectator.”

The Polish Theatre of the Holocaust joins a limited but growing number of English-language texts that examine Polish theatre as a broad subject, both chronologically and generically. Niziołek's study provides English-language readership an impressive exploration of the specificities of postwar Polish spectatorship, with audiences confronted by a wide range of performances that cut through the symbolic norms of Polish wartime narratives. For readers coming to this work without advanced knowledge of Polish postwar realities and cultural makeup, the book would work best as a whole; the second part of the book relies upon the deep contextual understanding of Polish positionality founded in the first chapters. Chapters in the second part of the book more quickly address theatrical takeaways without dedicating much space to rehashing the historical or political specificities of the moment. That said, the whole text is well worth reading, and presents numerous lesser-known or less critically evaluated theatrical explorations at the intersection of Polishness and Jewishness in the postwar moment.