Authors

Discussion

Ida Kamińska’s 1964 play Farshitn di bunkers [Bury the Bunkers! (Eng.), Zasypać bunkry! (Pl.)] focuses on a group of Polish Jews who took refuge in a wartime bunker, only to emerge years later to discover what had come of the world and their position within it. Performed in Warsaw in the increasingly tense environment of the 1960s, Kamińska’s play explores postwar Polish-Jewish positionality, questions of belonging and ghettoization, and specters of historical repetition. Never revived in Yiddish, Farshitn di bunkers! was one of Kamińska’s final theatrical productions with Teatr Żydowski in Poland before the March 1968 antisemitic governmental actions, as a result of which, Kamińska emigrated to the US; she wrote, directed, and starred in the play. Farshitn di bunkers! nuances postwar identificational complexities, demonstrating at once a complex form of Holocaust memorialization, an examination of wartime trauma, and a postwar use of a ghetto bunker as a palimpsestic mnemonic through which Polish-Jewish Holocaust survivors could uniformly identify, despite varying individual survival narratives; contemporaneous reviews commented on the strength of the play’s ideas, despite its ultimate production failures. This paper will contextualize the environment of the play’s production at Teatr Żydowski in Warsaw in the mid-1960s, while also historicizing its relationship to earlier representations of the Holocaust in the theatre’s postwar repertoire. Furthermore, this paper will analyze the key questions the play raises about Polish-Jewish postwar identity, demonstrating the on-going pursuit to stabilize Polish-Jewishness amidst the continued questioning of that possibility.