Auschwitz/Oświęcim

Poland's past seems to mean more than what it has at present.

my very first night train trip

Kraków is really old. Its age is not merely the numbers printed on The Lonely Planet's introduction page. Kraków's every single day is palpable, visible, flimsy, but still identifiable in every single brick. Compared to Prague, Kraków is much plainer, so inadequate that you start to doubt whether there's something missing in this Western Slavic culture. 

The complicated medieval Polish history may only be memorized by locals, while the most well-known part of Polish history is the part that all the Europeans and Poles want to forget. The trauma, the unbearable past, the time of violence and atrocity. It doesn't matter it's to forget or to stop remembering as long as there can be a blank, covering up the scarlet pages of history.

There's a narrow, dingy room, where Schindler's list is printed on the walls. Those names label the lucky ones, while they also insinuate a collective blank, a vacancy of people who had never left the death camp. Neither there is beginning nor end. It's karma, the circle of life and death, the stigma of human's foul being.

The Mani Wheel in Tibetan Buddhism purifies the soul and bring good karma whenever it's turned. However, there were six cylinders, telling the atrocity and unfathomable pain in six languages. Anyone who enters the room will fell lost, oppressed, horrified, petrified, and hopeless in the end because the wheels turn as the world itself turns. Everyone is as apathetical as the running time.


When I tried to read the quotation on the English wheel, it just stopped without any reason. It stopped while the other wheels kept turning. The whole world became silent, while I could only hear my heart's beating hasten. Time, space, and my eyesight: all frozen. The very first line on the wheel was: "Women were screaming: We are going to Gas Chambers!"

We visit the past to remember, to not to forget. So we went to Auschwitz/
Oświęcim.

"The one who does not remember history is bound to live through it again."

The Angel of History grimaces and throws itself to the churning blaze of history, where debris and fragments piled strait up to the sky, like the tumbled Babel Tower, the last communication with God. History lies where blood gushes and continuous scream lacerates the dark night.


Nazi taught Jews to work hard to set them free, while they didn't teach Jews to keep hope in the hopeless abyss.

"Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate"

On the path to inferno is no sunshine. The barbed and electrified fence sentenced them to death, which was the easiest salvation. Faces, names, photos, used glasses, prostheses, suitcases, and even woven locks. The inanimate objects are things depraved before the loitering souls faced their final judgement. Let there be darkness, and no daylight shall be ever shown again. 

I'd rather forget it, but History is the judge, ruthless. Since we are left no alternatives, embrace the infamous and chant for mercy, like pigs squeak before their throats being cut open. 

The wired world manifest an absolute freedom, the liberty to die or choose to die. No man is a loser in front of the Death.


So we dance and whistle while we enter the chamber, comforting ourselves the morning coffee for the next day will be as tasteless as usual, but still drinkable. 

Summer grass would climb over the window, muffling the wide-opened mouths, as if it hurts not. Autumn leaves cracks and whispers as they made the last long sigh. Winter snow conversely demonstrate the ultimate passion, embraces and hugs the carcasses with extreme amiability. Only Spring, the cruelest one, making cactus grow on the wasted land.


We are all waiting for Spring like an unexpected stranger.

Let the bricks fall and wood canker. Pray there's nothing left so that we cowards can pretend and act as if it were a movie, a prick joke, or a nightmare which we can conquer with candies and lollies.