03/08/2010

Krakow, Poland

I was the only one up for breakfast at 7.15 this morning, but stupidly I left my ticket i the hostel so had to race back and get it-but made the coach- just!! It is lucky I am alaways early for everything-THIS is why!!

On the way to Oswiecem, there is a demonstration (or another procession?) going down the road, I think it must be a demonstration- they have flags and Catholics are generally more respectful- as they walk on the pavement!

Oswiecem- what does one say about Auschwitz, except that the critics were right? As a visit: too rushed, too crowded, too regimented- it cries out more to the strict Nazi regimes rather than the silence, meditation, emotion and humanity that should be given over to memory. But an interesting case study for my research.

You are chauffeured around in large groups (before 3pm this is your only means of visiting), your guide has a lapel microphone and you all wear headphones and a receiver, you are taken to selected sites (not all) and queue up monotonously to peer through windows or to look in each room. After 1hr 1/2 at Auschwitz you get bussed over to Birkenau, which is 20x bigger to peer into 2 barracks and go up the watch tower for 20 minutes then you leave to return to Krakow.

The whole process is odd, the site doesn't seem to know what it wants to be. There is continuous reference made to the fact this is a "museum" and yet it isn't really about education, as the guide says a few times "I do not want to go over stuff you already know, you have seen the movies"??!?! What.... how can any movie portray fully the experiences of 2 million people? I am a believer that film can work as affective memory and affective history, but they are rarely accurate in terms of historical issues, facts, figures nor does it feel like a memorial- but a spectacle/ a spectacular- a thing to "tick off" the list on "things to do in Krakow"- summed up by the Irish girl last night who said she was "excited" to be going to Auschwitz? Excited- really? It visual display it is part museum, part historical artefact: the sign at the entrance says "silence" and comments on the need for respect, but this is contradicted by the large talk and walk tours which encourage questions.

The only sense of a memorial is at the Death wall and gas chamber where one can place an urn or flowers (these can be purchased at the shop)- the ovens have been reconstructed, but Birkenau left alone. The site doesn't seem to take a particular stand, perhaps it is trying to please everyone? But to preserve Birkenau as it was is powerful, whilst to reconstruct the ovens at Auschwitz feels strange to many of the visitors.

It seems the purpose of the site is to bring awareness of scale, magnitude and devastation to an uneducated mass, perhaps a case of "dumbing down" the Holocaust- which is not necessarily a bad idea, when it is often people who do not have such a keen interest in history/ politics enough to read/ challenge ideas and become a think that often are the ones who are easily led by radical politics. One of the members of my group summed it up with the clique, but poignant "never again"- yet I wonder how much "effect" it really has on these people- sites like Sobibor, Madjanek and Belzec conjure up a more natural and individual emotional response, they engage the senses- whilst one could never put yourself in the place of the unthinkable, one can stand to get a sense of being positioned as a witness: the sounds of Nazi commands, the bustling of people, the cries and screams of panic and the silence- but these sounds and images flash, sporadically into the mind amidst the silence of the now.

Auschwitz however engages one in a strict, laid our narrative structure from A-Z: you start at the Arbeit mach Frei replica gates (since the Swedish collector had the originals chopped up- despicable!) and ending in the "big finale" announced by the "we are now going to see the gas chambers..." (with no real sense of what this really meant!), the pointing out of "there is the hole in the ceiling, there is the hole in the ceiling, this is all real, the ovens though are replicas, this is real, the ovens are replicas, walk through and meet me outside by the door" was just cold- this made it feel like just another artefact- not a place where over a million people died (more than in any other place during WW2)- this should be the most moving memorial in the world, people should break down in fear/ tears here or say prayers in whisper, or lay items or remembrance, instead they gawp and alter the focus of their lens to get "the best shot". Emotional responses were too perscribed, the guide seemed to tell people what to think i.e. the Allies didn't interfere because their priority was fighting the war which would in turn liberate the camp. The exhibition followed too logical a narrative when there was no logic to these actions, the abstract and the symbolic are more powerful and more successful (in my opinion) in remembering the unthinkable, dumbing it down to logical facts in many ways takes away the "unthinkability" and thus, could be seen to side track from the aim of such memorials- to stop this happening again. Madjanek was a stark contrast: part "seeing" the past (but distanced by glass so as not to be experiencing it), seeing that this really happened, part education, part memorial and part abstract artist response.

At all the other sites I could sense the history, the humanity and the inhumanity, here I could not as hard as I tried during the tour- this saddened me greatly- it was tragic.

This afternoon I found myself quite miserable because of this, I had a pizza and sheltered from the rain and wandered around the Old Town- nothing spectacular in the day time: just millions of restaurants, then walked back to the hostel and have been updating my blogs since. Now in my room is an Irish guy from Dublin and a group of Boys from Highgate: why is al of the UK in Poland!