robi roboty

i feel as though krakow is a city perched precariously on an edge, an edge with no parallel lines, no rounded edges. it teeters between its past and its future, inextricably tied to the former but yearning so hungrily for the latter. it wants to be exploited, but it does not want to be cheapened, to have its honour dulled. today i visited a museum-to-be, a one room exhibit which only began charging the pittance of 3-zl two weeks ago. what the future holds for the place one does not know. it is out of the way, hidden amongst car part shops and empty, weed-riddled lots. from the exhibit, we could look out onto the factory, but the man who took the money did not say we could walk out towards it. he also did not say we couldn't. which was just as well, because walking around it did little for one's attempt to grasp the gravity of the place or imagine it 65 years ago. standing outside the factory where oskar schindler 'saved' 1,100 jews from certain death did little to connect one to the people, the stories, the lives, did little to force one to place oneself in the context of this history and say 'this is my history; we are all members of the same story.'
at the same time, i was relieved. there was no maudlin re-creation of factory life, no workers' hut replicas, no gratuitous photos of schindler or his workers, no cartoons, no animation, no shrine to steven spielberg. it was simple and modest. in a time when a visit to oswiecim means maneuvering around loud school groups and camera-laden couples, the factory, and nearby plaszow, was a sweet reminder that we can still treat sombre events in history with dignity. this is not to say that one should not visit oswiecim or forget its relevance; indeed, the opposite. what is unfortunate for oswiecim is that is has the best pr. it is and should continue to be available to every member of the public.
what is unfortunate is the profusion of memorials erected around the world. i fear that in our haste to memorialise and build and make manifest our guilt and sorrow, we begin to forget the thing itself, and forget that things like it continue to happen in our world. there is nothing to differentiate the deaths of masses of people, and yet we hold onto One as an anchor, point to it and say 'this is bad,' but choose not to label as bad when modern governments declare unprovoked war, ignore contemporary genocide, or even re-label it as 'regional conflict'. if we must claim we are persistently memorialising the holocaust of the second world war in an effort to prevent its repetition, then we must take notice of the patterns being repeated right under our noses, and, indeed, cease the repetition.

i didn't mean to engage in this tangent. ah, well.