Grandfather's Leather
‘Skóra po dziadku’ (Grandfather's Skin) is an adaptation of Mateusz Pakuła's second novel. His debut novel, ‘Jak nie zabiłem swojego ojca i jak bardzo tego żałuję’ (How I Didn't Kill My Father and How Much I Regret It), was first a literary sensation and then a theatrical sensation. Pakuła once again draws on his family history, but this time we are transported to the epicentre of Stalinism in the early 1950s, when his teenage grandfather is sent to a torture chamber in Kielce for a youthful prank. Who got him out and why? How were the war, the Holocaust and the Kielce pogrom connected to this event?
‘Before I found out who Jews really were, I was already anti-Semitic,’ begins Mateusz Pakuła, referring to the history of his hometown, Kielce, where a pogrom against Jews took place on 4 July 1946. Can memory be inherited? Can guilt be inherited? What happens to history when those who lived through it pass away and are replaced by subsequent generations burdened by silence? These are just some of the questions addressed by the director of How I Didn't Kill My Father… in his latest play.
