Don't Tell Mama

Simply put, I fell in love with Prague. It's nobody's fault. I was born this way. We are in love and are getting married.

An exaggeration? Perhaps. But not by much. I spent a weekend in Prague on a whim and picked exactly the right time to be there. Between Christmas decorations, the wonderfully seductive smell of hot wine and cooking smoke, and the overall surrealist vibe, there was little not to love. I spent the better part of the weekend walking through the mazes of the old town. It was almost reminiscent of the fabled labyrinth. Despite my best attempts, I never seemed to follow the same route twice to get places. The streets twist and turn in a maze of Goliathan buildings that ooze age and good taste. Yet, it seemed delightful surprises rather than a malevolent bull-man figure was lurking behind every corner. I'm perhaps too comfortable with just showing pictures. However, I have no choice here. Describing the wonderful and invigorating time I had would be insufficient. I spent a few hours watching Jan Svankmajer films on loop in the modern art museum then went to see the Christmas market officially open. I wandered through the Old Jewish Cemetery and examined buildings of historical significance in both Prague Spring and the Velvet Revolution all in the same weekend. It happened in such a blur that I'm quite happy that I took so many pictures.

Frankly, I distrust memory.

Mein damen und herren, madames et messieurs, ladies and gentlemen...I am pleased to present you with...Prague, a city in pictures (and comments from me).

So this building stood out to me as something to photograph. It reminded me of what a building might look like if Edward Gorey converted to Christianity and started sketching on buildings. 

This is the building where the Golem is supposedly hidden. There's no way to get into the attic (where the Golem allegedly is) but previous expeditions into the attic (including a Nazi who supposedly climbed in and never came out) have not yielded any proof that there's really a Golem hidden there. It's a pity. Who couldn't use a big, strong Jewish man lying around the house?

Kafka statue. You'll notice it's sitting on top of a mosaic of the infamous "monstrous vermin."

Death and a Turk on the Astronomical clock. Apparently white Christians could not be associated with sin in the Middle Ages. Go figure. 

Giant faceless babies at the modern art museum. 

Old Jewish Cemetery. The graves are 12 layers deep and over 150,000 bodies are buried here.

The World Won't End

This month has been something of a whirlwind. I could go into a long, overly detailed explanation...so I will. I spent the first part of the month traveling to Warsaw, Berlin and Norway (you can read more about this in my previous post. Two days after I returned from Berlin (on a Wednesday), I was in Krakow with a few other of my darling Fulbright family visiting Auschwitz. The general consensus seemed to be that we all knew it was a place that needed to be visited and none of us wanted to visit it alone. So we bundled in our coats against a wet November chill and rode in the comfort of a minibus to the site synonymous with unimaginable atrocity. To be quite candid, I'm not sure how I felt. I expected to feel more than I did. There was something simultaneous sickening and numbing about the entire experience. The two emotions were unsettlingly able to exist inside me for a few hours without dulling the other. There were some rooms which evoked remarkable disgust (such as a room full of human hair, a separate one filled with artificial limbs stolen from murdered inmates, and countless others). The impact was jarring. It was like looking at the lives of people you don't know in individual pieces, as if the material objects that represent their existence were organized and compartmentalized behind glass. The absurdity of the Holocaust, the lack of logic behind it, was evident. This is where the numbing came in. It was like looking at a surgery on screen. There was something quite real about it but also a comfortable barrier of historical distance that allows it to exist simultaneously as something existing in the same state of reality in which history dwells. This post will be shorter. It's almost like the monument to Loss mentioned in Memoirs of a Geisha. An artist builds a monument to loss with one word on it. However, the word is scratched off because when one experiences loss, it cannot be read, only felt. There's not much I can do to explain the complexities that I'm still feeling from this particular visit. Words are painfully inadequate.
 

Maybe This Time

"Closure. She's looking for closure."

One especially astute young student made that comment when my class was discussing "Forgiving Dr. Mengele" (a documentary discussing the decision of one Eva Mozes Kor to forgive the demented experiments to which she was subjected as a Mengele twin during the Holocaust). This moment seemed to encapsulate the entire topic of Holocaust literature that I had just covered with my sophomore English students. Wasn't Vladek Spiegelman looking for some sort of closure when he burned Anya's diaries? Wasn't Art himself seeking closure for the life he experienced in the shadows of his parents' mutual trauma and mixed ability to cope with the prospect of survival? Perhaps Simon Wiesenthal too was seeking some form of closure when he asked his reader if they would forgive a dying Nazi. As I learned this previous week, Jan Karski was unable to find closure as a Righteous Gentile. He spent his life torn between his invaluable services towards exposing the brutality of racism in the National Socialist regime and the gnawing sensation that he could have done more.

Times are marginally different. The number of Holocaust survivors dwindles. There are monuments to the Holocaust that simple read out the names of the deceased. Picture a room made of mirrors reflecting the light of a single candle that, in the labyrinth of obsidian panels, multiplies to millions and is entirely silent except for the listing of names of murdered children. The names become almost anonymous, as indistinguishable as the candles staring back in the cosmos of a single space. We have the luxury of memory rather than witnessing. Yet perhaps this luxury has done more damage than it has provided closure.

As an educator, I feel it is my duty to ensure that young people are educated about the past (chiefly as it is expressed through literature). However, these people are the heirs to a planet that has seen war and hatred manifest as genocide countless times in its history. We remember what has happened but are gutless, neutered to any actual response until after the damage is done. Armenia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Serbia, Cambodia. The deceased are then added to the list of names that increasingly lose their meaning. We seek closure but this, like a candle in a mirror, is a reflection. It cannot be touched, let alone achieved.

It is this philosophy which motivates me to study how the world teaches the next generation about what previous generations have done. The past week, while certainly filled with happy, memorable moments with my fellow Fulbrighters, also was designed to help me expand, reflect upon, and conceptualize my understanding of an education that espouses social justice and the earnest belief that the world can be repaired with the proper tools. It is the search for these tools that took me to three distinct locations, each offering its own unique methodology for preserving memory, confronting the present, and paving the path to improvement for the future.

1. Warsaw, Jan Karski Conference.

For those of you who do not know, Jan Karski is (arguably) Poland's most famous Righteous Gentile (an honor bestowed by Yad Vashem in Jerusalem for those who took personal risks to help Jews in the Holocaust without seeking any sort of monetary compensation or religious conversion in return). This was a man who spent his entire life after the Second World War haunted largely by his belief that he had not done enough. Responsibility was a vital component of his character and it was this sense of civic duty which motivated his life. While there were many Righteous Among the Nations as well as countless others who acted with compassion during an amoral time, there is something especially compelling about the question of ethics in moments where ethics seem unimportant at best and a weakness at worst. Visitors to the conference included colleagues of Karski's from Georgetown University, artists, historians, government officials, and a survivor of the Rwandan genocide. Questions flew, many of them about who we blame for the Holocaust in Poland. Finally, one especially disgruntled speaker stated plainly, "Who do we blame? The ones who did the killing."

I coupled this conference with a visit to Warsaw's Jewish Museum. As I walked through the exhibits which traced the history of the Jewish people from the middle ages to the contemporary time, there were several questions which rooted rapidly in my mind. Primarily, how can I as an educator ensure that questions of ethics and morality are not sideswiped for the sake of time or convenience? I think back to discussions about ethics and capitalism in Brecht or dialogue about gang violence in Romeo and Juliet. Is there something missing in American education when it comes to ethics? Too often we like to handle children with the care and sensitivity of an Easter egg. We refrain from posing difficult or challenging questions out of concern for "sensitivity" or the fear that students might say things we just don't want to hear. Flatly, if this is the course that American education continues to take, it is doing its children a disservice. It seems that a proper education would indeed instill a fundamental criticism for historical ethics and include substantial dialogue about how we can foster our own sense of ethical existence. This, in turn, would produce some sense of responsibility, a trait modeled by the countless Righteous Among the Nations who proved that ethics are not meant to hide during turbulent times.

2. Norway

Norway's history during the Second World War is somewhat less devastating and complex than Poland's. Norway, like Poland, fought fiercely against Nazi occupation. Both hosted bold and dedicated resistance movements. However, unlike Poland, significantly more of Norway's Jewish population survived. There are a plethora of historical reasons for this. Neutral and Allied territories (such as Sweden and the UK) were much closer to Norway. Despite this, however, many Jews were killed in Norway as part of the Holocaust.

What is perhaps more noteworthy of my time in Norway is the focus on Norway's place as one of the world's most tolerant nations. This tolerance was largely the purpose of my visit. After making contacts with and establishing an interview with the Rafto Foundation (a  Norwegian human rights advocacy group in Bergen), my questions as they related to education were informed by the Foundation's educational workshops on Democracy, Discrimination, and War/Dehumanization. The group advocates a dialogue-based approach to learning about these three components of human rights discussion.

Dialogue and discussion are indeed essential parts of learning about catastrophic events and finding solutions for situations of injustice. My time in Norway expanded my understanding of social justice education largely due to its focus on the future. While the events of the past do play a significant part of our understanding of the present and future, without a clearly defined concept of what must be prevented, a knowledge of the past does little good. Furthermore, this concept must be the result of democracy and dialogue. People must work together to act as a shield against human rights abuses as a coalition rather than courageous individuals.

3. Berlin

This was perhaps the hardest part of my project thus far. I am German. My heritage is firmly rooted in this nation that has been the cradle for culture, art, and science for thousands of years. I am enormously proud of this heritage. Dadaism, Beethoven, Hildegard, Goethe, Bach.... But I digress. It's no secret a shadow still hangs over Germany due to the events of the Second World War despite the fact that most of today's German population was not alive for these events, let alone collaborative in them. However, there seems to be an unspoken rule that people constantly view Germany with Nazism in the back of their minds. While I plan to visit Germany multiple times and experience the culture that walks hand in hand with my heritage, I must, regrettably, dedicate a large part of this post to Holocaust discussion since that was the focus of my trip and my Make it Happen project.

Few nations today can boast the tolerance and liberalism that Germany represents. I looked forward to visiting Berlin for weeks, despite the historical irony that a queer Jew would look at Berlin as a safe-haven. I thought about the vibrant Weimar LGBT underground scene including film, magazines and music that heralded Berlin as an LGBT Mecca in the 1920s. I spent my senior year researching this period and I craved something of this liberal, open environment as if it were something I could purchase in a shop as soon as I got there.

Berlin proved to be all I could want in terms of a diverse and open-minded city. Walking through Berlin was an almost electrifying experience. The streets were lined with illuminated orbs that symbolized the fallen Wall. People from all walks of life paraded the streets to commemorate the day that East and West Germany began the process of reunification. Some might say it is truly Germany's best age. The economy is booming, its education is free and of high quality, and it has become a beacon of open-mindedness. This stems from, in large part, the frankness of Germany's confrontation with its own past.

Germans today bear no responsibility for the events of the Second World War. Yet it is not an uncommon thought when one sees older Germans to silently wonder, "Where were you in 1933?" It However, Germany's cities (including the vibrant Berlin)  is saturated with monuments to the victims of the war (including Romani people, Communists, Jehova's Witnesses, LGBT people, and people with disabilities). One such monument is the compelling and humbling monument to Europe's murdered Jews. With a design based on Prague's Jewish cemetery, the monument seems to represent chaos and order existing simultaneously. The large concrete blocks feature uneven tops but perfectly gridded alleyways between them. While walking through this space, a tight and distressing claustrophobia seems to set in. One longs for the openness that exists outside of the guts of this sterile labyrinth. The effect of this was quite impactful. The experience lent itself to reflection about its purpose both as a historical commemoration and as a work of art.

Similarly impactful was the Berlin Jewish Museum. This featured a room where a robotic arm writes the Torah at the same pace as a human would. It is a jarring, almost disturbing image. The sterility of the mechanical arm as it writes the fluid, lively hebrew on a seemingly infinite scroll of paper took getting used to, to say the least. There was a room in this building (concrete, lacking in climate control or lighting, 26 meters high). This room is called the Holocaust tower and is designed to exemplify the void left in German Jewish life by the Holocaust. I had been battling an ear infection for several days before I entered this room. Looking up caused vertigo. To speak the truth, looking anywhere but straight ahead caused vertigo. However, as I looked up into the cold darkness of this tower, my head began to spin for medical reasons. I pinned myself in a corner and continued to look up as the room twisted in my vision like a tilt-a-whirl. The other two people in the room stared at me slightly and then left quickly. God only knows what they thought was happening. The void, however, was demonstrated perfectly despite my inability to get it to sit still.

The progress that Germany has made is undeniable. It's history has been broken down into pieces that you can purchase on the street (like the Young Pioneers friendship pin I purchased from a man for 4 euro or the remnants Berlin Wall that has been cracked and crushed into souvenirs by tourists. Its history seems to be a melting pot where nothing melts. Yet a vibrant nation and rich culture have endured. It is a nation honest with its history but also entirely active in ensuring that the atrocities of the World War are public and thoroughly depicted.

How many other nations can claim such a response to a previous inhumanity? Certainly not the United States. When I was taught Civil Rights, the pictures were always of Martin Luther King, Jr speaking in front of the Lincoln Monument. Occasionally one might see a photograph of a "whites only" sign. I certainly didn't see the pictures of teenagers being doused by fire hoses. Images of hot coffee being poured on students sitting at segregated lunch counters were censored from the mix. Indeed, America's own genocide against the First Nation people is glossed over or presented in the cheery false-balance of the Indian Wars or the First Thanksgiving.

It all blends together into an essential question of how we teach children responsibility to prevent injustice. Furthermore, how can we unite children across the world to partner together to advocate human rights?

It was in Berlin that I rounded off my reflections about where my plans for social justice education must go.

I won't share them here because they are still shapes held only in soft clay and perhaps it is best that they stay only somewhat formed for the time being. I'm not looking for closure just yet.

All my love.
K.

Halloween

The combination of smoke from chimneys and the farthest reaches of light pollution from the city gave the sky an austere tone as if it were toxic to breathe. The color was a smokey orange that seemed to produce its own light, more alien than human. In fact, it held an almost spot-on Halloween ambiance. Eldritch and mournful at the same time, it couldn’t have been better to see on All Hallow’s Eve.

Regrettably, this sky became a day late. This eerie sky was the backdrop for my first All Saints’ Day. 

Through the woods surrounding one of Citadel Park’s  military cemeteries (the perfect place, we had been advised, if you don’t have anyone to mourn), we could see the lights glowing with unyielding persistence. There was nothing cavorted or twinkling in them. Each flame sat behind colored glass and offered neither sentiment nor signs of neglect. What it did insinuate was something that neither picture nor words could adequately convey. 

The park itself was thrust into the history books in 1945 as the site of the last Nazi stronghold in the Battle of Poznan (an event which devastated the city and left much of it in piles of rubble). Today, it houses several museums and several military cemeteries. The graves are thus uniform for the most part and offer little explanation beyond birthdate, death date, and nationality. Each grave was fashioned with a small jar (some were red, some green, most clear) with a candle inside. The end result while stumbling through the hillside was a sea of light. The solid ground drifted away and what was left seemed almost cosmic, less tangible than soil, but offering boundaries only in the form of where light from the thousands of candles could reach.

I reflected on this holiday sporadically over the week. Naturally, I associated the end of October with Halloween. It is, without doubt, my favorite holiday because if offers a campy environment in which mirth and sorrow exist simultaneously. The philosophy or sanctity of the day has long since drained for most Americans. As one of my Polish students phrased it, “There’s no philosophy behind it. People just get in costumes and drink.” I can see what she meant. We hollow out pumpkins in the United States and illuminate them from the inside to keep away what we want to stay only in a memory. Jack O Lanterns are designed to send a message to the dead to stay put, to frighten things away. In contrast, the candles on All Saints' Day are designed to help the dead, to navigate a path in a vacuum of darkness.

In this cemetery, there was a certain peace, a silence appropriate to the circumstances. People meandered through the maze of illumination, pausing occasionally for their own reasons. Yet to someone looking in from the outside, there were just candles sitting on the graves visited largely by those who, as we were informed, had no one else to keep the path lit for them. 

Other photos from the week:

On the Steps of the Palace

I'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

Several of my fellow Fulbrighters decided to gather in Krakow for a workshop on "Green English" (or, teaching environmental responsibility in English classes). Obviously, there could not have been a better location. Krakow is a gorgeous city (one of the few cities in Poland to survive the war without major destruction). It is large, expansive, beautiful, and literally spills history with each step you take. I do not exaggerate when I say the past has soaked into the ground like rainwater in dried soil. It felt part fairy-tale and part horror story when you consider the pristine, ancient loveliness of the city combined with its gruesome recent history. Beauty and tragic existing side-by-side is becoming a recurring theme, I'm discovering. More on that later, however.

Let's start with arrival.

Picture it: Poznan train station. Thursday.

Corinne and I walk up to the ticket counter:

Me: 2 billety Krakov?
Woman: Something in Polish. God knows what. *holds up a schedule indicating a train at 14:40 that doesn't arrive until 22:56.*
Corinne and I exchange looks of concern and terror.
Me: 2 billety Warsawa?
Woman: Speaks in Polish. The word problem is recognized. We assume she's saying "No."

Corinne and I end up on an 8 hour train ride from Poznan to Krakow. This fate could have been avoided if we could have been sold the tickets to Warsaw and then taken a train from Warsaw to Krakow. The trip would have been 2.5 hours shorter. However, had that happened, we would not have made a new friend known as "Gas man."

Gas man might call to mind someone with IBS or a kindly gentleman who you call when the gas in your house is off. Or, as I now know, it can mean a sketch-ass mofo who runs into your train carriage and sits in an empty seat. The room immediately smells like gasoline (or maybe paint thinner). The gentleman begins opening and closing the door to the carriage while peaking his head out. He then amuses himself by doing the same thing with the curtains. Meanwhile, the carriage quickly fills with the smell of gasoline (which we suspect he was carrying in a large plastic bottle that he shoved into his dirty hoodie pocket). Eyes immediately begin to water. No one can really breathe and yet here is gas man just doing his thing.

My immediate thoughts were along the "Jesus take the wheel" line. Who IS this person? Who?

Fortunately, after he decided to hop from carriage to carriage and hide in the bathroom, gas man was thrown off the train at the next stop and the world rejoiced.

We arrived in Krakow and discovered that the quiet nighttime streets of Poznan are deceptive. This place was party central. The music and shouting from the streets outside of the hostel continued well past midnight. I'm not entirely sure what they were talking about but I hope they had a good time while some of us were busy not sleeping.

The next couple of days consisted of Fulbright bonding and wandering around Krakow.

Photos follow.

It's 11pm. Do you know what statues your children are taking pictures of?

Turns out I don't really either. I'm not sure who this is a statue of, but the dramatic shadow was too much to ignore. 

Statue of a saint outside of St. Peter and Paul Church. It might not be a saint. In my defense, there are lots of statues of old white men here. I can't keep up. 

This is from the Dragon's Den under Wawel castle. Apparently legend has it that a dragon lived under the castle.

No. Really. This is an artist's rendering of what the dragon may look like. See the peasant? He's DONE with that dragon and those sheep. He literally can't even. 

Whatevs. Enemies of the heir beware. 

This is St. Mary's Basilica. I didn't go inside. However, this is the place where the trumpeter of Krakow plays the Hejnał Mariack on a daily basis to commemorate the sentry who signaled a Mongol invasion and allowed the city time to shut the gates and thus prevent an ambush. He was shot in the throat before he could finish and so the song stops abruptly in compliance with this Grimmsian saga. 

Wawel Cathedral 

Swans. Terrifying, violent swans. 

The inside of the beautiful Wawel castle and...

Some Jew holding bags of money and pennies! See how happy they are? 

           Wait. What? 

Yeah. This little tidbit caught my eye while we were visiting a gift shop inside the castle. I'm not totally sure what to make of this. Casual antisemitism is alive and well. Just look at how cuddly these things are. It's like if Wallace and Gromit had a quirky Jewish neighbor who liked to count his money and charge interest on loans.

Honestly, I'm still processing this one. Antisemitism is bad enough. Repackaging antisemitism so that it seems cute is even worse. This image sat on my stomach the entire day. I really, REALLY wish I hadn't seen this.

We ended the evening in the Jewish quarter of Krakow which is now synonymous with nightlife and trendy bars. We encountered one such bar in an alleyway that was featured in Schindler's List.

This is the alley as it looks today. 

The alley as seen in the film. 

I kept most of my internal conflict internal during this time. However, I found it difficult to concentrate by this point in the evening. The combination of the magnets and the realities of being in the area where Krakow's Jews lived before they were evicted and sent to the ghetto weighed a lot on my mind. When we were standing in the center of the Market Square in Kazimierz, I literally couldn't look at anything without thinking about the catastrophic loss that occurred not only in Krakow, but in Poland in general. I looked at the windows and saw tombstones staring back. I looked around at people walking through the streets and began playing a righteous gentiles game in my mind. I clearly pictured the most disturbing scene in Schindler's List when the German soldier puts down his gun and plays Bach on the piano while the sounds of machine gun fire and the destruction of the Krakow ghetto is heard in the background. The sophistication of European art and music is dropped disturbingly in middle of savage and inhuman destruction. Then I thought back to the magnets in the store and the beehive of thought came to a boil.

Simply put, I placed too much trust in my emotional distance from events that happened 70 years ago. I've studied the Holocaust in books since I was in 4th grade. I did major college research projects on the NS period in Germany and antisemitism in Europe. However, the page failed to transmit the conflict of thought that exists when something is tangible and no longer existing sole in academic terms. I've walked through Yad Vashem. I've seen the pictures and home movies of a culture and people ripped out of the planet by the roots. Yet I could barely walk down a street that I would not have recognized without a few pictures on a wall in an alleyway. 

I'm not quite sure what else I can say on the matter. I'm still working my way through a bit of a shock in terms of confronting the actualities of contemporary history. It is one thing to read about something. It is quite another to stand where it happened. Yet it seemed almost impossible to be solemn. Music blared from colorful bars. People (myself included) spent lovely evenings with friends sipping drinks and having some laughs in this area that seemed almost haunted. This is only the beginning. My research will include visits to concentration camps and visits to countless museums about genocide education. However, these places tend to be frozen in time. There is an intellectual stability that comes with these places. They are designed to inform rather than illicit emotion. They focus exclusively on what once was. There is no accounting for progress and healing. There no accounting for plump little Jewish figurines smiling blankly into the glare of a coin in their hands sold alongside postcards of Krakow, cobalt china,  and floral-print aprons. It goes back to the beautiful and the perverse sitting on the same stoop.  The inevitable occurs. Life continues but memory and history remain like persistent green plants growing in sidewalk cracks. 

I'm working harder to check where I'm walking.