Although they admired Grotowski’s formal theatrical strategies, foreign scholars and critics remained unaware of the relationship between Grotowski and Borowski.
In Poland, however, it was common knowledge that both the form and content of Grotowski’s Akropolis were inspired by Borowski’s writing and the style of his prose. In fact, many have suggested that in his theatrical strategy, Grotowski replicated Borowski’s writing style. As Osiński points out, that relationship was completely overlooked, however, in european and American circles.387 Tadeusz Borowski (1922–1951) was a Polish writer, poet and essayist who survived Auschwitz, wrote a highly acclaimed series of concentration camp stories (published in the USA under the title This Way for the Gas, Ladies and Gentlemen), and committed suicide in 1951 by inhaling gas from an oven. Borowski’s 1942 volume of poetry has an “apocalyptic and catastrophist tone [that] stands out against the poetry of his generation, which was shot through with a grand romantic urge to fight.”388 The poster for Akropolis quotes an epitaph from a poem by Borowski. The poem cited by Grotowski goes like this:
Nad nami – noc. Goreją gwiazdy, dławiący, trupi nieba fiolet.
Zostanie po nas złom żelazny i głuchy, drwiący śmiech pokoleń. Above us – night. Smoldering stars, stifling, putrid purple of the sky.
We’ll leave behind us iron scraps
and hollow sneering laughter [of those – generations – who’ll come after us].389
In Poland, the last two lines of Borowski’s poem are considered a kind of sacred motto of the so-called Columbus 20 generation, the generation born in the 1920s. The term comes from Roman Bratny’s novel Kolumbowie. Rocznik 20 [Columbuses: Generation 1920s], which was published in 1957.390 The novel chronicles the stories of young intelligentsia partisan fighters, spanning the years 1942–1948. They were in their late teens and early twenties when the war broke out. They fought in the underground resistance army (AK, Armia Krajowa [The Home Army]) during the Warsaw uprising; they studied at the secret universities; and they died in concentration camps and nazi prisons. They were the lost generation – those who died, and those who survived but never truly recovered from the horrors of the war. Bratny called them the Generation of Columbuses because,
as he said, they were the ones who discovered Poland, meaning that when faced with the very real prospect of their nation being obliterated, they put aside their private lives, dreams and desires to defend it.391 Borowski was considered one of the Columbuses, and his poem acknowledges the tragic truth of this generation: the fundamental, cosmic inconsequentiality of their sacrifice. It also asks, implicitly and bitterly, for remembrance.
This remembrance was intrinsic to the postwar nation-building of communist Poland, but, because it was wrapped in the newly installed communist regime, it inevitably became a part of Soviet propaganda. The new establishment equated fascism with capitalism, and emphasized the Soviet victory over both. Communist leaders cultivated wartime memories for their own purposes: the dead were to serve as a constant reminder of the military deliverance and the military might of the Soviet Union.392 Thus, the everyday life of Poles revolved around national holidays commemorating the people, the battles, the victories and the defeats of the war.
The war existed in Poland’s national consciousness on two levels: the personal and the political. Personal mourning progressed along its natural course through works of literature, poetry and film. But this mourning never had a chance to work itself out fully because it was perpetually reinforced and redefined by the artifice of the official, politically sanctioned mourning, framed and imposed by the governmental structures that regulated all the media, celebrations, school ceremonies and numerous other secular rituals of remembrance, most of which seemed to never end. eric Santner argues that, since Germans were the perpetrators, they were not allowed to officially mourn their own dead and thus experienced a process of failed mourning: a form of self-denial.393 If Germans as the perpetrators were not allowed to openly mourn their dead, Poles in a way were doomed not just to mourn theirs forever, but to live with them in the constant, frozen presence of Soviet propaganda. The national post-traumatic stress disorder was ingrained in the very fabric of the political regime, and became an essential part of the postwar Polish psyche.
Historically speaking, unlike the Columbuses, Grotowski’s generation, those born during or just before the war, did not remember the war from an adult perspective;
Grotowski was born in 1933 and thus six years old when the war started, and 12 when it ended. But Grotowski and his peers were the children of the Columbus 20 generation and lived in the same psychic reality their parents had. It is no accident that Grotowski chose Borowski’s poem for his poster. It is also no accident that he chose to set Wyspiański’s play in Auschwitz. Since World War II, Auschwitz has been a part of the Polish self-definition, the knowledge of it ingrained in the national consciousness and passed on as part of the nation’s epistemology. ewa Lubowiecka, one of Grotowski’s actresses, recalls a childhood experience of visiting Auschwitz:
When I was a little girl, my mom took me to Auschwitz. My shoes got stuck in the mud with protruding white human bones. In the barracks, thousands of shoes, hair, some made into braids, children’s buggies, purses, glasses, suitcases. Incredible numbers. This memory became vivid in Akropolis: we repeated: shoes, shoes or hair, hair, hair.394 Lubowiecka’s experience was typical for Polish children of her generation, and her memories of Auschwitz were shared across the spectrum of Polish society. Grotowski
captured this feeling in one of his interviews: “I didn’t do Wyspiański’s Akropolis, I met it. I didn’t illustrate Auschwitz from the outside; it’s the thing in me which is something I didn’t know directly, but indirectly I knew.”395 He added:
We eliminate those parts of the text which have no importance for us, those parts with which we can neither agree nor disagree. Within the montage one finds words that function vis-à-vis our own experience. The result is that we cannot say whether it is Wyspiański’s Akropolis. yes, it is. But at the same time it is our Akropolis.396
Clurman noted that “Akropolis takes place on the threshold of mass extinction.”397 Raymonde Temkine summarized her interpretation in one sentence: “Akropolis is the story of the extermination of all people after an outbreak of barbarism pulverizes them.”398 In his 1963 review, Bogdan Bąk wrote that the play might as well have been titled Akropolis from the Epoch of the Ovens.399 And, writing on the occasion of Grotowski’s death in 1999, Holger Teschke referenced both the Katyń massacre of Polish officers by the Soviets and Auschwitz in his description of Akropolis: “Grotowski’s Akropolis was constructed within the socialist camp, whose enclosures included the forest of Katyń. […] It lives in the darkness of Cracow’s cathedral, where the shadows of Veit Stoss’s figures sleepwalk in the night; it reaches up toward the dark clouds of Auschwitz, toward the smoke rising in spirals.”400 none of the foreign critics, however, delved into the details as to the literal meaning of Grotowski’s images they so praised.
The original program for Grotowski’s production also included a few fragments from Borowski’s At Our Auschwitz (the title is hard to translate into english in a way that would preserve Borowski’s bitter nonchalance; in French, it would be “Chez-nous Auschwitz,” suggesting a restaurant, a family retreat or a summer camp). The passages inserted in the program go as follows:
1) We work beneath the earth and above it, under a roof and in the rain, with the spade, the pickaxe and the crowbar. We carry huge sacks of cement, lay bricks, put down rails, spread gravel, trample the earth… We are laying the foundation for some new, monstrous civilization. Only now do I realize what price was paid for building the ancient civilizations. […] If the Germans win the war, what will the world know about us? They will erect huge buildings, highways, factories, soaring monuments. Our hands will be placed under every brick, and our backs will carry the steel rails and the slabs of concrete. They will kill off our families, our sick, our aged. They will murder our children. And we shall be forgotten, drowned out by the voices of the poets, the jurists, the philosophers, the priests. They will produce their own beauty, virtue, and truth. They will produce religion.401
2) One day I was goalkeeper. […] Between two throw-ins in a soccer game, right behind my back, three thousand people had been put to death.402
3) not long ago, the labour Kommandos used to march in formation when returning to camp. The band played and the passing columns kept step with its beat. One day the dAW Kommando and many of the others – some ten thousand men – were ordered to stop and stood waiting at the gate. At that moment several trucks full of
naked women rolled in from the FKL. The women stretched out their arms and pleaded:
“Save us! We are going to the gas chambers! Save us!”
And they rode slowly past us – the ten thousand silent men – and then disappeared from sight. not one of us made a move, not one of us liftend a hand.403
4) But this is how it is done: first just one ordinary barn, brightly whitewashed – and here they proceed to asphyxiate people. Later, four large buildings, accommodating twenty thousand at a time without any trouble. no hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis. Only several men directing traffic to keep operations running smoothly, and the thousands flow along like water from an open tap. All this happens just beyond the anemic trees of the dusty little wood. Ordinary trucks bring people, return, then, bring some more. no hocus-pocus, no poison, no hypnosis.404
Borowski’s passages fittingly grounded the conceptual framework of Grotowski’s production.405 The set of Akropolis was bare, stripped to its essentials: pipes, bags of cement, wooden planks, a wheelbarrow. designed by Józef Szajna, himself an Auschwitz survivor, the set was an attempt to reflect the bareness of the camp. As Grotowski reminisced:
These scenic elements – pipes, shoes, wheelbarrows, costumes – were very intentionally found. It’s no accident that [Szajna] picked these elements. He has always been called abstract. The scenic elements of Akropolis were not abstract, but neither were they realistic. These elements were concrete objects, things from bad dreams, but all completely “untheatrical.” Szajna found these objects in flea markets and junk shops.406
Szajna’s contribution to Akropolis has been widely acknowledged, and in Poland he is credited as the show’s co-author, although with time many have diminished his role.
In fact, he collaborated with Grotowski on the text as well as the set. Szajna came to the theatre from painting. Before joining Grotowski, he was already established as a successful artist and set designer. For his art, Szajna drew inspiration from his own experiences as an Auschwitz prisoner. Born in 1922, he was sent there as a boy.
After a failed attempt at escape, he was sentenced to death and was miraculously saved from the group of prisoners being led to their execution. Akropolis is Szajna’s best-known spectacle, but it was followed by the critically acclaimed Replica (in its four versions) and an adaptation of Tadeusz Hołuj’s Puste pole [empty Field].407 Both shows attempt to illustrate the experience of Auschwitz by using metaphors, symbols and visual parables. In Empty Field, produced in 1965, the prisoners, dressed in the characteristic striped uniform, run onto the stage accompanied by the ominous clicking of wheelbarrows. In Replica, often called Requiem, a pile of trash – rags, shoes, pipes and pieces of mannequins – covered with dirt greets the entering audience. After a pause, an outstretched hand reaches out from beneath the pile, greedily grabbing
a piece of dry bread. Soon enough, the dead resurrect; horribly massacred bodies emerge slowly from the pile of trash, indistinguishable from the surrounding objects.408 Likewise, in Akropolis, Szajna wanted to portray “a day from the life of a man who became a number.” As he said, “I filled the space with piles, wheelbarrows and old tubs, because the prisoners were ordered to build a grave-crematorium for themselves.
Their costumes consisted of old burned-out potato sacks, with wounds and bodies carried like clothes. The low-set berets emphasized their faces – musselmen’s masks – and wooden shoes clunked with the movement of millions of legs in the process of camp misterium.”409 Many critics, including Gurawski, suggested that Szajna lacked a fundamental understanding of the theatrical space, as he used similar props (prisoners’
garb, clogs, wheelbarrows, pipes) in Empty Field.410 Szajna, in his defense, cited his camp experiences as fundamental to his theatrical choices: “Our production – with its Akropolis-Oświęcim association as a symbol of modernity, […] found its inspiration in my personal experiences as the prisoner in Auschwitz-Birkenau, which were essential for us.”411 Szajna brought to Akropolis his experiences but also his own aesthetic. The fact that he was an Auschwitz survivor searching for a means to process and express his experience adds to our understanding of the show as foremost a post-traumatic work meant to retell the experience. Other members of Grotowski’s creative team shared similar experiences. Ludwik Flaszen, for example, spent the war with his family in an internment camp in Uzbekhistan, due to their partially Jewish heritage, and Zbigniew Cynkutis’ father was among those killed during the Katyń Massacre.
Like the cast’s personal experiences, Szajna’s experience in Auschwitz influenced his approach to set design while he worked with Grotowki on Akropolis. Raymonde Temkine notes that during the performance of Akropolis the set transforms into a symbolic wall, trapping the audience members in the space of the camp:
The room is hung with ropes set in the shape of a spider web which the spectators hardly notice when they enter the room. But, at the end of the production, the pipes nailed to the ground are hung on the ropes, enclosing them in a metallic trap. Thus, the spectators, too, are caught in the concentration-camp universe.412
In his review of the show, Gawlik compares the staging to a scene from one of the paintings of Jerzy Adam Brandhuber (1897–1981), an Auschwitz survivor and one of the founding members of the Auschwitz museum site, whose series of paintings Forgotten Earth depict scenes from daily camp life.413 French reviewer emile Copermann, in his review of Grotowski’s Paris premiere, compares the staging to Bosch’s Hell.414 Other reviewers compare it to Marc Chagall.415 Raymonde Temkine marvels at the affinities
“between Grotowski and certain painters – Caravaggio, Rembrandt, and Ribera.”416 Responding to those painterly comparisons, Clurman argues that they are incorrect, as Grotowski’s minimalist aesthetics lack the opulence of the painters to whom he has been compared. Clurman writes: “The names of Breughel, Bosch, Grunewald are frequently invoked for purposes of comparison; but that is misleading, for there is sumptuousness in those artists. Grotowski’s stage, architecture, costuming are bare.
everything has been stripped to the bone.”417 The struggle of both critics and scholars
with the contextualization of Grotowski’s piece derives from their strategy of focusing on mise-en-scène, trying to interpret the play through the prism of known visual markers.
Lacking the specificity of the cultural framework, critics and scholars turn to “sharp and loving descriptions” as a way to draw the familiar parallels and thus make meaning out of the dense, multilayered theatrical text. Margaret Croyden, for example, was but one of the few American critics whose “sharp and loving descriptions” make the problem of decontextualized reading apparent:
To see the Laboratory Theater is to be transplanted into a black, brooding world of classical myth and contemporary degradation, depicted in an atmosphere of horror, executed with the delicacy of a poet. […] Against the eerie screeching of a violin and the dead silence of the audience, the inmates work in unison – hammering, lifting, and hanging their pipes and chimney stoves on vertical wires – building their Acropolis turned crematorium. Intermittently they re-enact ancient myths with the stylized precision of acrobats or mimes. dressed in torn, worn-out sacks, heavy, oversized brown wooden clogs, and colorless skull caps that negate their sex, the prisoners move with exquisite control, their arms and legs dangling with the grace of a mobile sculpture.
Their faces (untouched by make-up) are gray death masks: eyes turned inward, smiles frozen, foreheads ossified – creatures from another land, tortured wrecks, brutalized automatons. They speak, chant, whisper, and intone, creating an unrelenting rise and fall of sounds quite unlike anything usually heard in Western theater.418
“Sharp and loving,” Croyden’s description lacks specifics. She reads the show in the broader context of universal horror that she knows from TV and books.
yet Grotowski’s Akropolis has no plot resembling an episode of TV or short story;
there is only action that parallels Borowski’s description: the prisoners working in the camp, carrying pipes, planks and bags of cement. Grotowski describes the action of the play:
The prisoners worked all the time. They took metal pipes that were piled in the center of the room and built something. At the start, the room was empty except for the pile of pipes and the spectators were disseminated through all the space. By the end of the production the entire room was filled by the metal […] We organized it all into the rhythm of work in the extermination camp, with certain breaks in the rhythm where the characters refer themselves to the traditions of their youth, the dreams of their people.419
Within this camp structure, Wyspiański’s Akropolis enters the production in a metatheatrical fashion as a play within the play. Grotowski did not stage Wyspiański’s Akropolis within Wyspiański’s story; he staged it within Borowski’s. The story provides the primary setting of the production.420 “The actors did not play prisoners, they played what they were doing – people plunged into absurd, detailed routine.”421 To amuse themselves, to pass the time, and to take their minds off their work, the prisoners in Akropolis “reenact scenes from the Old Testament and Homer” during breaks in their labor. The religious aspect of the enacted texts also appears in Borowski book, which
wryly describes everyday camp life: “directly beneath me, in the bottom bunk, lies a rabbi. He has covered his head with a piece of rag torn off a blanket and reads from a Hebrew prayer book (there is no shortage of this type of literature at the camp), wailing loudly, monotonously.”422 As Borowski notes, the religious wailing was a background noise in camp’s daily life, while piles of prayer books of all religions and in all sort of languages needed to be processed daily. One can imagine a single page or two carried
wryly describes everyday camp life: “directly beneath me, in the bottom bunk, lies a rabbi. He has covered his head with a piece of rag torn off a blanket and reads from a Hebrew prayer book (there is no shortage of this type of literature at the camp), wailing loudly, monotonously.”422 As Borowski notes, the religious wailing was a background noise in camp’s daily life, while piles of prayer books of all religions and in all sort of languages needed to be processed daily. One can imagine a single page or two carried