JACOB’S BURden

Grotowski was very much influenced by Hasidic philosophy. He admittedly read Martin Buber’s I and Thou, and Gog and Magog, and was greatly impressed by Buber’s philosophy of history and religion. Buber, an Austrian-Jewish philosopher who believed in the Hasidic principle of the unification of religious practices with everyday life, was fluent in Polish, and his writings were quite popular in postwar Poland. As Karen Underhill pointed out,

Buber’s early lectures on Judaism and his and his wife Paula Buber’s retellings in German of Hasidic tales appealed particularly to those who had moved away from traditional religious practice, had been educated in German, Polish, or Czech, and had joined, or hoped to join, a cosmopolitan, secular european culture as citizens of their respective countries. estranged from their ethnic and religious traditions, and often no longer speaking a Jewish language, whether Hebrew or even yiddish, many in this generation developed a more or less-articulated longing for a revived relationship with Jewish tradition. […] He was able to appropriate the image of the Jew as Oriental, to make it a sign of how Jews had in themselves and in their tradition a source of deep spirituality that modern european intellectuals and artists were now seeking. […] Buber describes a particular type of individual (variously described as the Oriental, the Jew, the mystic) who is open and susceptible to the perception of that authenticity and wholeness.⁵⁶²

Grotowski was particularly interested in the relationship between Hasidic and Polish messianism. He believed that Poland was a cradle of Hasidic thought, and that Hasidic philosophy influenced Mickiewicz’s Romantic messianism.⁵⁶³ In the same way that Wyspiański considered Poland to be rooted in the traditions of both Old and new Testaments, Grotowski saw a deep bond between Polish and Jewish cultures.

Grotowski’s insistent emphasis on the Jewish aspect of Akropolis, however, ran counter to political propaganda that constructed the image of Auschwitz as foremost a place of national Polish and universal human suffering. As Grzegorz niziołek pointed out, Auschwitz was used by the Polish Communist Party to solidify a sense of national unity by reflecting the unprecedented national sacrifice. The proclamation of 2 July 1947 establishing the Auschwitz Museum, for example, stated that the museum’s role is to “commemorate the suffering of the Polish nation and other nations.”⁵⁶⁴ The Jewish side of the story was woven into the general narrative about the camp. ewa Lubowiecka, who participated in rehearsals for the first version of Akropolis, described

the atmosphere of that period:

Today we think differently about Auschwitz, but back then, the concentration camp was a symbol of Polish martyrology. nobody talked about Jews. It was obvious that they also died there, but nobody knew that Auschwitz was built specifically to exterminate the Jewish people. But even back then, Grotowski already thought that this shouldn’t be a secret.⁵⁶⁵

In many ways, by drawing attention to Jewish mythology and Jewish martyrology, Grotowski very consciously broke with the government-established national narrative.

The Jewish motive that Grotowski took from Wyspiański is particularly important.

In fact, Grotowski changed the order of the second and third acts so that, in his version of Akropolis, Jacob’s story becomes a leading narrative. The switching of the two acts has a double meaning: Jacob, the biblical patriarch who receives the blessing for himself and his people, becomes the Greek Priam lamenting the destruction of his people; he becomes the leader of the dying tribe. Jacob’s mother, Rebecca, becomes the Greek Cassandra, daughter of Priam. In Greek mythology, Cassandra is given the gift of prophecy from Apollo, but because she doesn’t return his passion, he curses her so that no one takes her prophecies seriously. Cassandra’s knowledge and powerlessness symbolize humanity’s existential tragedy, and her madness “evokes the same awe, horror and pity as do schizophrenics.”⁵⁶⁶ In Akropolis, Rebecca/Cassandra was played by Irena Mirecka, and in the final 1967 version of the spectacle, her figure, alongside that of Jacob/Priam, eventually came to dominate the story. Jacob was played by Zygmunt Molik, who opened the play with violin music. The image of the prisoner-musician is emblematic: an orchestra of Jewish prisoner-musicians was customarily ordered to play joyous songs to accompany prisoners’ marches to the gas chambers. Jacob’s song, Tango Milonga, was an international hit before the war; it was written by two Polish-Jewish musicians, Jerzy Petersburg and Andrzej Własta. The song was often played during the selection process at Auschwitz, and eventually it came to represent a symptom of the “hate of music” that Pascal Quignard describes in his philosophical essay La haine de la musique (1997).⁵⁶⁷

Following Borowski, Grotowski also used the Jewish aspect to broach a very difficult subject: the participation of Jews in the extermination of other Jews. The heroic, fighter image of the Auschwitz prisoner that dominated Polish politics and culture in the postwar era demanded that the prisoners were always represented as a unified force against the nazi oppressor. There was a kind of taboo around stories of collaboration between prisoners and nazis, especially those involving Auschwitz prisoners, and in particular the Sonderkommando, a special unit of Jewish prisoners that assisted in the killing process. The Sonderkommando supervised the selection process and the gassing of the prisoners; they segregated the possessions of those killed, pulled their gold teeth and burned their bodies in the ovens. The units were also responsible for covering up the nazis’ crimes. Often, they witnessed and participated in the deaths of their loved ones. The Sonderkommando lived separately from other prisoners; they were allowed to take food they found in the belongings of the dead and they were often

healthier and better fed than others. As witnesses to the killing machine, members of the Sonderkommando were perfectly aware that they would also eventually be killed;

nevertheless, they agreed to their fate in hopes of a miraculous survival.⁵⁶⁸

Writing about Sonderkommando and their tragedy in his short stories, Borowski broke yet another taboo. Andrzej Wirth points out that the classical concept of tragedy, with the hero of superior moral standing succumbing to larger forces, fails when faced with the enormity and anonymity of the Holocaust. Focusing on the ambiguity between the criminal and the victim in his stories, Wirth argues Borowski creates a shattering condemnation of the nazi system in which human beings lose any sense of their singularity, becoming a formless mass of flesh that needs to be processed and disposed of: “The de-individualization of the hero [leads to] a de-individualization of the situation.”⁵⁶⁹ There is no emotional, intellectual or any other kind of relationship between the murderer and the victim. Wirth writes:

Ultimately, murder is committed by machines: and it is led up to by countless limited decisions taken by countless people as if in the void, without any emotional or even intellectual link with the objects of crime. […] The victims are inhuman, nondescript and either they do not represent any values or they represent negative ones like fear, degradation and willingness to collaborate with the tormentor.⁵⁷⁰

Following in Borowski’s footsteps, Grotowski used the same artistic strategy of alienation and “de-individualization.” Appropriately, Clurman’s observations of Akropolis nearly parallel Wirth’s critical take on Borowski’s stories. Clurman poignantly notes:

In Akropolis, the executioners and their victims become nearly identical: they are kin.

[…] The prisoners themselves have been reduced to savage blasphemy. They are no longer individuals but the debris of humanity. If pity and terror are evoked in the spectator, if his moral sensibility is affected, it is through a kind of impersonal revulsion, from which he recovers as if from an anxiety dream he remembers as something intolerably spectral. One cannot normally sustain or assimilate such experience.⁵⁷¹

In a similar tone, Ludwik Flaszen eloquently writes :

Trapped at its roots, this image of the human race gives rise to horror and pity. The tragi-comedy of rotten values has been substituted for the luminous apotheosis which concluded the philosophic-historic drama of the old poet. The director has shown that suffering is both horrible and ugly. Humanity has been reduced to elemental animal reflexes. In a maudlin intimacy, murderer and victim appear as twins.

All the luminous points are deliberately snuffed out in the stage presentation.

The ultimate vision of hope is squashed with blasphemous irony. The play as it is presented can be interpreted as a call to the ethical memory of the spectator, to his moral unconscious. What would become of him if he were submitted to the supreme test? Would he turn into an empty human shell? Would he become the victim of those collective myths created for mutual consolation?⁵⁷²

Irving Wardle notes that “Grotowski’s method is to expose classical myth to the test of modern experience and what he does here is to remove the action to a death camp and ask how far the classical idea of human dignity can withstand our latest insight into human degradation.”⁵⁷³ Grotowski’s Akropolis asks spectators not just to remember the dead but also to question their own humanity, as Robert Findlay points out:

“The audience members inevitably were trapped in a merciless self-confrontational questioning: under similar circumstances, what would I do? What would happen to all my polite, civilized values? Would I too crack? What would become of me?”⁵⁷⁴ In his New York Times review, Clive Barnes puts it more explicitly: “Grotowski’s purpose in Akropolis is to challenge the audience to see itself in the context of Auschwitz. To accept some iota, a scintilla of that horror, to be involved in that web of human choices and squalid heroism.”⁵⁷⁵ In such circumstances, Kalemba-Kasprzak notes,

“The Aristotelian concept of catharsis escapes aesthetic categories and begins to carry psycho-social functions. Grotowski’s vision of the Akropolis-necropolis is as much of an image of the twentieth century as it is a process of descending into the dark and unspoken realms of our subconscious.”⁵⁷⁶ And, finally, Peter Brook specifically addresses audience experience: “The experience is there to be taken or not by the people who come. The experience is for the receiver, if he wishes […] you do not have to participate, you do not have to take what is there, but few people who get there can resist.”⁵⁷⁷ Like Borowski, Grotowski challenges the spectators to tell the truth, foremost about themselves, and, like Borowski, he questions the line between victim and perpetrator. As he frames it:

We did not show victims but the rules of the game: in order not to be a victim one must accept that the other is sacrificed. At that moment we touched something essential in the structure of the extermination camps. For example, the scene between Jacob and Angel: Prisoner “Jacob,” kneeling, carries the wheelbarrow on his back and in it is the prisoner “Angel.” The Angel must lie there, but Jacob will die if he does not rid himself of his burden. during the fight Jacob says the words with very beautiful, elevated melody – all of the stereotypes of the meeting between Jacob and Angel.⁵⁷⁸

Flaszen describes this scene in more detail:

The struggle between Jacob and the Angel is a fight between two prisoners: one is kneeling and supports on his back a wheelbarrow in which the other lies, head down and dropping backward. The kneeling Jacob tries to shake off his burden, the Angel, who bangs his own head on the floor. In his turn the Angel tries to crush Jacob by hitting his head with his feet. But his feet hit, instead, the edge of the wheelbarrow.

And Jacob struggles with all his might to control his burden. The protagonists cannot escape from each other. each is nailed to his tool; their torture is more intense because they cannot give vent to their mounting anger. The famous scene from the Old Testament is interpreted as that of two victims torturing each other under the pressure of necessity, the anonymous power mentioned in their argument.⁵⁷⁹

The poetic aspect of this scene clashes with the reality of the camp; to survive, Jacob participates in the extermination of an Angel, whose body becomes a limp object to be gotten rid of.⁵⁸⁰ In another scene, Jacob kills Laban by stepping on his throat. Robert Findley describes the scene:

Jacob comes to his uncle Laban (Cynkutis), and there is a death struggle over Laban’s daughter Rachel, symbolized by the piece of plastic wrapping which earlier symbolized the hair of the corpses. The struggle is a tug of war between two prisoners over a seemingly near worthless object. eventually the prisoner playing Jacob overcomes, pressing his foot to the throat of the prisoner playing Laban, whose eyes suddenly go dead.⁵⁸¹

The scene is short and brutal. Flaszen points out that Jacob’s “relationship to Laban is not governed by patriarchal law but by the absolute demands of the right to survive.”⁵⁸² Similarly, the scene between Isaac and esau is not about the filial violence of brother against brother, but about the necessity of violence: “esau tips the wheelbarrow so that Isaac’s body rolls out into the bathtub. esau says: ‘Jacob, Jacob. I will kill Jacob my brother.’”⁵⁸³ Margaret Croyden notes that “not only Auschwitz but the whole world appears to be a concentration camp. People kill each other swiftly and smoothly.”⁵⁸⁴

Grotowski models both Jacob and esau on Abramek, a Jewish Sonderkommado from one of Borowski’s stories. Abramek is a Polish diminutive of the name Abraham. In the Hebrew Biblie, “Abraham is imagined as the vehicle for revealing God’s splendor to the world. […] Although the Bible begins with Creation, the narrative of Western cultural origins begins with Abraham.”⁵⁸⁵ In Jewish eschatology, it is through Abraham that the divine enters human society, and it is with him that God makes the covenant.

Abraham is the first patriarch in the social sense as well. The story of his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, his son, as proof of his faith is the first narrative to connect death with the language of the sacred in a larger, socio-political context; it creates the fraternity of faith that demands and gives death as the price of belonging. In a way, Abraham’s story provides a framework for the Western, Judeo-Christian understanding of the sacred. In Borowski’s story, however, Abramek is an antithesis of the biblical Abraham.

For Borowski, there are two kinds of Auschwitz prisoners, the Muselmann and the lagered. Abramek is a man lagered, a symbol of the complete dehumanization of the human psyche; he is a prisoner who cynically accepts and adjusts to camp life. He remains indifferent to everything that happens to him: ovens, orchestra, hangings, gas chambers. He learns the rules of survival and accepts them as given, skillfully navigating the reversed moral code of Auschwitz reality. In a deadpan voice, Borowski narrates his conversation with Abramek, who tells him about a new method of burning children’s corpses. To amuse himself and make the job easier, Abramek treats the corpses like toys:

“So, you’re still alive, Abbie? And what’s new with you?”

“not much. Just gassed up a Czech transport.”

“That I know. I mean personally?”

“Personally? What sort of ‘personally’ is there for me? The oven, the barracks, back to the oven… Have I got anybody around here? Well, if you really want to know what

‘personally’ – we’ve figured out a new way to burn people. Want to hear about it?”

I indicated polite interest.

“Well then, you take four little kids with plenty of hair on their heads, then stick the heads together and light the hair. The rest burns by itself and in no time at all the whole business is gemacht.”⁵⁸⁶

“Congratulations.” I said drily and with very little enthusiasm.

He burst out laughing and with a strange expression looked right into my eyes.

“Listen, doctor, here in Auschwitz we must entertain ourselves in every way we can.

Otherwise, who could stand it?”⁵⁸⁷

In Akropolis, Abramek reemerges, as Grotowski includes this fragment of Borowski’s story in the program notes. Complicating the issue of the victims’ participation in the Holocaust, Grotowski, like Borowski, creates a world of inverted values, in which there are no moral lines to be drawn because everyone is implicated in one way or another in the mass murder. On a larger scale, Akropolis thus implicates the humanity (and the Polish nation) as a whole: everyone has the potential to become lagered.

Chapter 19