“The Dead Class”

In his essay “Klasa szkolna” [A Classroom], Tadeusz Kantor described how the idea for the play emerged: “1971 or 72. At the seaside. In a small town. Almost a village. A single street. Little poor one-storey buildings. And the poorest of them all: the school. It was summer holiday. The school was empty, abandoned. It only had one classroom. One could see it through dirty panes of two meagre windows, placed just above the pavement. It seemed as though the school had sunk below the level of the street. I stood there with my face glued to the windowpane. For a long while, I kept looking into the dark and hazy depths of my memory. Once again, I was a little boy sitting in a poor classroom in my village, behind a desk injured with pocket knives, covered in ink stains, licking my fingers to turn the pages of my primer, the floorboards were worn out by constant scrubbing and the bare feet of village boys seemed to perfectly correspond with them. Whitewashed walls, plaster falling off by the floor, a black cross on the wall”.