Eva Hoffman's first play

On July 10 1941, in the Polish village of Jedwabne, 340 Jews — men, women and children — were murdered, locked in a barn which was set on fire by a group of Polish men. Decades later, this atrocity was investigated by the Polish government and commemorated at a ceremony held in the village.

Present at the ceremony was Eva Hoffman, the eminent Polish-American writer, who had been invited by the Polish ambassador to the UK. She was struck by the passion and the intensity of the occasion. “It was like a five-act Greek drama,” she says. The speeches included one by the mayor of Jedwabne, who spoke with “great dignity, with the eyes of the world upon him. ” Then the dignitaries and townsfolk walked through the forest to the site of the barn, and a rabbi spoke — “a beautiful speech, his hand shaking.” He was old, but had grown up in the town before the war, and remembered the Jewish community which had been wiped out.

Back home in London, Hoffman felt she had to capture the drama of the occasion, and distil its many threads of meaning into something new. Her own life was intimately connected to the story, her parents having survived the war hiding in a forest bunker. Hoffman was born in Krakow in 1945. “I grew up with this history,” she says.

She is best known for writing books and broadcasting, but knew this would have to be a play, albeit one which uses the actual speeches and testimony as its source material. Her drama gives voice to many people, including the ancestors of the villagers, the victims and — unusually — the perpetrators.