You never know what you'll remember or be ashamed of..’, says one of the characters in Remnants. It is a play about memory, exile and longing for a world that no longer exists. A longing for the residents the memory of whom has been erased.

The adaptation is based on plots drawn from Mikołaj Łoziński's Stramer, an evocative, multi-voiced chronicle of the lives of a Jewish family in pre-war Tarnów, and two episodes from W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants. In his book, Łoziński subtly creates an intimate portrait of an extended Jewish family just before the outbreak of World War II, while the protagonists of Sebald’s book are West European Jewish exiles and their stories are told based on photographs, his own recollections of the characters, their diaries, recorded itineraries and forced emigrations.

An important thread in the play is photography, so often present in Sebald's work, as a device for capturing time. The characters in Stramer also have their pictures taken to memorise significant moments in their lives, as if sensing that the photographic film will remain the only material trace of their existence.

‘Because I moved a number of times I must have misplaced all my childhood photos. When I realised this, I felt as if someone had taken something from me,’ says Ewelina Marciniak. ‘We don't want to talk about great History, but about the lost lives of ordinary people, to identify at the traces of their former existence, to investigate the places where we can still sense their absence. By looking at their old photographs, we can try to bring back the world in which they lived. To try to evoke the shame of having done away with the memory of those people so quickly.

Cast

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