Tour of the museum
The German philosopher Theodor Adorno once said that after Oświęcim it was not possible to create something authentic. The Polish author of the short story "A Visit to the Museum", Tadeusz Różewicz, however, refuted this theory when writing about the tragedy at Auschwitz from the point of view of a cool observer of reality, including the post-war one.
Holiday situation 2010: Masuria, beautiful weather, a lot of money (because the high school diploma is so nice, the grandson), the prospect of studying only from October (and yet there is July). Swimming on the boat, next to the boat, without the boat, slowly starts to bored. Maybe it's time to get a glimpse of the time? Pascal's weekend guide "Poland" offers many interesting places, so we go. Between Święta Lipka, the fields of Grunwald and Malbork, we plan to have a Wolf's Lairman. We don't wonder why, for what reason, or what reasons, we, the Poles, can see Adolf Hitler, who is interesting in the headquarters. The bodyguard charges a fee of PLN 5 per person for driving in one car. Go to the guidebook collection point and form a group. The guide - necessarily with a belly - recommends the purchase of still mineral water Żywiec-Zdrój, only 5 zł for a small bottle, because we will certainly feel thirsty. A small, intimidated girl becomes a guide's adjutant, because Hitler also always had an adjutant with him - a constant grip on the trip, so that the child would not get in the way. From the entrance to the base we learned everything about Hitler's genius, we saw places where he made decisions about murdering Jews, the paths on which he liked to walk, and even his personal library, because he was such a sensitive person. The guide informs that at the end of the trip you can buy a statue of a small Nazi at a convenient price, have a good dinner in a green building, and send a postcard on the spot. The restaurant resembles a bunker. The dish of the day is Führer's favourite cake, everyone orders it, because it's all about it during the summer holidays in order to get to know the world.
On departure - fee 5 PLN per person. Only half an hour after leaving this strange place, we ask ourselves: what was it, why was it, for what purpose is it? This situation reminded me of after reading Tadeusz Różewicz's short story entitled: Excursion to the Museum. I did not have the opportunity to visit the Auschwitz camp, as no school where I was offered this, and it is usually the school that travels to such places. However, I know what all this looked like in 1957, because my grandmother worked on the reconstruction of the Pomeranian Dukes' Castle and was a warehousekeeper. After the first renovated part was opened, exhibitions devoted to the Oświęcim crime were organized there, and grandmother and her friends went to Auschwitz to obtain material evidence. They collected shoes, clothes, toys, hair. The more you were paid for it, and the smaller the shoe, the higher the salary, because it's so touching. My grandmother was born in 1937, but she still remembers very well how they hid their whole family in a lantern during the bombardments.
She only went once to collect evidence, and on her return she resigned from work at the Castle. She did not tell me about the exhibitions she organized there until three years ago. Tadeusz Różewicz, volume entitled: Proza was published in 1959. The story focuses on the post-war history of the camp, which is visited by people who are dressed, noisy, impatient and even tired of walking around the museum. They like to look at the gallows, they like to look at the rooms where Jews were gassed and then they were given gold teeth. Oh, they slept here, it's great how much the bunker can fit in that tight room! It would seem that the worst group are young people who did not know the war - they take photos with German subtitles - they would certainly have put them on Facebook, had it not been for the fact that there was no Internet in Poland at that time. The camp's tentative photo. The story is a satire, it deliberately exaggerates the behaviour of people when they visit a place that is a memorial site. During a long weekend on the occasion of All Saints, I had the opportunity to visit Warsaw. We were just going to the Palace of Culture, when suddenly among typical communist blocks of flats we noticed an old, collapsing tenement house with huge pictures of Jews - it turned out that we were in the ghetto. There was a huge inscription on the pavement: "Ghetto wall 1940-1943".
However, there was no market stall with a figure of a small Jew to buy there, no books about the tragic death of the Jews, and no tickets to the museum and to the whole crowd of visitors. There was only a piece of preserved history, an inscription on the pavement, on which people trampled, and an old tenement, which nobody even noticed. Had it not been for those huge photographs, would I have guessed myself that there were Jews living there? It makes sense to visit the camp, of course, when it is a sightseeing in honor of and in memory of the deceased, and not then, when their death becomes a tourist attraction. Taking the youth there in the form of an organized group is not much justified either, except that they will raise their hands to the question "Who was in Auschwitz", and most of them do not even know the exact time frame of the Second World War. The truth is that there are no 'bad young people', 'bad children', 'good elderly ladies' and 'good adults'. There are good and bad people. Among the young, there are sensitive individuals who are vividly moved by the history of the Jews, but one such person is overwhelmed by a multitude of his thoughtless colleagues. Consumptionism has nowadays gone so far that one goes to every place "for pictures", but most of all "for souvenirs". Rarely is it about survival.
In Różewicz's story, the visitors see not only the camp, but also the normal life: children of employees, playing in the museum grounds, sandboxes, swings and bikes. However, this was also the case during the war, when a carousel stood outside the ghetto wall, as described by Czesław Miłosz in his poem entitled Campo di Fiori. Guarded parking - guarded, so paid. The question is, is it really necessary to have a guardian there? Would the elderly man, sitting in a booth with a television and a small fiscal cash register, be able to intervene in the event of a robbery? That is the point. The more cruel the books on display are, the better they will be sold.
There is everything in it, the whole story, including torture. People like bloody stories, they lack adrenaline. People like to watch the Pianist and In Darkness, because it's "very good Polish films". Museum of torture during holidays in Leba - we can see gallows, pumpkins, a wheel for breaking bones. After entering Auschwitz, people expect something "stronger", and here only blocks with barbed wire. The chest under the gallows became an involuntary waste bin. The man is watching horrors, reading crime stories. War is not something terrible for him, especially after many years since it ended. It becomes something distant there, like the Battle of Grunwald - it was, everyone knows, it was, the dates are more or less known and they are learning about it in history, but how many people are able to give details? Only those who are interested in a given issue. After the death of the last person who remembered the war, a generation will come that does not remember the times when there was no Internet. The people in the story went to the cinema in great numbers - cinema was an attraction at that time, and now the young people, taking a moment of rest, would write SMS on their smartphones instead of watching the film. The guides also complain about young people, but it is the organized groups that, due to their numbers, support the camp's employees.
The only person in the story who saw how Joseph really was in Auschwitz was - it turns out that his memoirs are radically different from the book truth of the guide, but people still ask for evidence, they want to see their hair. They are not interested in the truth, they want to see, and the best thing to do is to touch it. Man is now like disbelievers Thomas. A child who asks her about the reason for storing her prostheses in a museum gets a typical answer: "A stupid child! Listen to the guide. The guide uses such arguments as millions, kilos, thousands, known to all aphorisms, and references to school readings. Tired of a trip, father answers his daughter's question about the reason why people were locked up in a bunker: "If they were naughty, they closed them down here. And if you are naughty, they will close you. After leaving the camp, visitors again see people who live normally - a pregnant woman, a little girl, and a cow in the field. Life is still going on, despite the crimes committed by the Nazis. Tourists on the train did not talk about the museum, rather about their own fatigue, or about souvenirs. They didn't notice the freight train on the tracks next door - just as people did during the war. The majority of the Aryan side did not notice the ghetto and the camps.
The death of four million Jews became only statistics, their cut hair was converted into kilograms, and the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp became a tourist attraction, on which the toilets were erected for 480 thousand zlotys. For foreign tourists, so that it would be the best proof of Poland and Poles. Tadeusz Różewicz in his short story "A trip to the museum" shows how a thoughtless generation of people is if they do not remember the war. It is an illustration of a visit to the camp, which in most cases looks the same - and it is not at all a worship or prayer for the murdered Jews...