On the guards and other inconveniences - Tanya Gold in Harpers:

‘Kazimierz is the Jewish quarter of Kraków, in southern Poland. You might know it from Schindler’s List, which was filmed here and has given the district a nickname: Jewrassic Park. The remains of a pastiche of the Płaszów concentration camp, built for the movie, are in a limestone quarry nearby. YouTubers record themselves there, staring at pieces of barbed wire. It’s odd that Steven Spielberg felt the need to dump another concentration camp on Poland. Perhaps it is an expression of control.’

(…)

‘I say “shalom” to a group of German men too loudly. They look like Vikings. I am not just saying that. They respond like the first-night audience for Springtime for Hitler: with a silence so profound it’s functionally a noise. It seems they don’t want to talk to a live Jew in the Jew-themed café. It’s as if the real Donald Duck turned up at Disneyland, and they seek only the Donald Duck of their imagination. I try to be interesting, a Jew that walked off a shelf. When the band plays Jewish music, I sing along and bang the table. I am a tourist attraction, and I am filmed.’

(…)

‘Poland’s trauma sometimes mutates into something that feels like a Mel Brooks film. Nowakowski was once approached by a man who claimed to be from the town with the last surviving synagogue in the Polish highlands. “The man says, ‘We are going to do a museum of the Righteous from our village.’ ” Nowakowski replied, “Great idea! Let’s do a quick check of how many of them there were from your village.” He asks me—how many? “Zero!” he shouts. “How many of them from the neighboring village?” He pauses. “One!’’ Once, he says, during the Jewish Culture Festival, a Shabbat service was oversubscribed and eighty Poles waited at the door. An Israeli group that had reserved seats was admitted. Some Poles were angry. “You just told us there was no room in the museum,” he says, mimicking the group. “You’re lying! You’re lying! You care only about yourselves, you Jews! We are bloody Poles in bloody Poland, and we have a right to be in this Jewish Shabbat service!”’

(…)

‘When I inquire into Jewish life, they wave me toward the Oshpitzin Jewish Museum with something like relief, though I stay long enough to score a goal in their ice hockey exhibit, which thrills me. The Jewish Museum is attached to a small synagogue renovated with funds from the Diaspora. I have never seen such a pristine synagogue, but then it has no congregation: it feels like a theater whose actors have left. It is attached to the house of the last Jew of Oświȩcim, Szymon Kluger, who died in 2000. In his honor, it is now a hipster café: pale wood, board games, exotic teas, badges for sale that say coexist. I slowly eat a bagel and think, Isn’t it a little late for that? Kluger’s house exists in carefully preserved remnants related to portals: an old door mounted on a wall, the imprint of a mezuzah on a doorway. But he couldn’t leave. He tried.
In the museum, I meet Artur, a grave and studious man. When he grew up in Oświȩcim, he says, local history was “empty, like a blank page. I’m sure many people don’t want to talk about it, want to forget it. A small group tried to revive the community, but they all left. Mostly because of anti-Semitism, they left the town.” He takes me into the synagogue and shows me a Torah. There are two: gifts from American Jewish groups, a glut. I ask if I can kiss the hem of the cover, and he permits it. It is so awkward an encounter that we might as well both be English.’

(…)

‘Jerzy Putrament, a Communist, wrote a prophecy in 1948, when the Auschwitz museum was one year old. “I can imagine perfectly the sort of American tour by Cook,” he wrote.
“Do you know the largest extermination center in the world?” “Encounter hell!” Such tours would be divided into normal, tourist, and “special.” The special tours, for a suitable extra charge, would include the following: transport to the camp in boxcars (the last ten km) with 120 people in each car, a cattle drive with truncheons carried out by specially uniformed SS men.
Alex, my driver in Kraków, is Putrament’s tour guide from the future: at least he tried.
Putrament would appreciate the one-star reviews of Auschwitz on Tripadvisor, with which I am mildly obsessed. There are many complaints, not about its existence but its logistics. “I was so looking forward to this trip,” writes Mike from Pocklington. “What a letdown . . . No atmosphere . . . Sorry but very disappointed.” “Terrible waste of time!” writes Piotr from Warsaw, who complains about the queue. “I believe that the Management of the Museum should start thinking more about Customer Experience!”’

(…)

‘In a monstrous storm, I meet the journalist Konstanty Gebert, an expert in comparative genocide, in his vast apartment in downtown Warsaw. I love his book-lined home because I have spent days inside Bellotto’s parallel reality, leaving only for POLIN and to see a Disney film at the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science, another parallel reality.

Each party, he says, believes “the war was about us. Everything else was a footnote. Speak to the Serbs: the war was about the Serbs. Don’t even try talking to the Kurds. Essentially, world history is about Kurdish suffering.” The history is different, he says. “Their psychology is exactly the same as ours. We need to dwell on our suffering, because if we don’t, nobody else will, and all that blood will have been in vain.” Gebert says, “We live in a bubble, from Britain to Warsaw. A rich, protected bubble. We just pretend we don’t realize it.” The real world is not here, he says, and he is right. The real world, he says, is Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah. “We have failed to understand that a world with an Auschwitz cannot be mended. The ambition of trying to make it good again is wrong. It detracts from the serious job of understanding. It happens each time. The wars over memory, the distortions—simply because a genocide leaves a hole in the heart of the world that cannot be filled.”’

Read the article here.

Auschwitz and the Customer Experience, the stupid or unsensitive questions, the comments on the guides and their clothes, the irony appears to be a bit trite in 2024.

I remember reading about Kazimierz decades ago that it was a Jewish quarter without Jews.

The dead Jews are okay, the living Jews not so much.

But Konstanty Gebert tells the truth: the wars over memory have become the more important ware, or maybe this was always the case we just failed to notice.

Everybody is dwelling on their own suffering, because who else is going to do it?