Lessons From Poland

(originally written 10/27/10 - we visited the Schindler Museum and Kazimierz on 10/15/10)

Oskar Schindler was a jerk. He joined the Nazi party early on and spurred by his own sense of opportunism and the extremely low cost of employing Jews, took over a factory in Krakow that had been confiscated from Jews. He had a criminal record before the war, including a death sentence. He was a serial philanderer who left his wife penniless in Argentina some years after the war as he fled back to Germany with one of his mistresses. His post-war businesses all failed and he died penniless. He also saved hundreds of lives.

We visited the Schindler Museum, which is installed in that same factory in Krakow, on a drizzly Friday morning. Our impeccable timing had us arriving mere moments after another bus had disgorged a mass of tourists onto the site.* Luckily, the ticket buying process was the only irritating factor of the visit. The museum has timed admission, so we waited about half an hour before entering and rarely felt crowded once we were in.

This museum is not an Artifacts-In-Cases kind of museum, but neither is it a pull-the-lever, push-the-button dumbed-down Imaginarium of a place. It's multi-media and immersive and includes lots of interviews with survivors of the Nazi occupation of Krakow. There are films and various news reel footage, pictures, and yes, artifacts (chess pieces made out of bread by prisoners; a "human leather" wallet) all contextualized chronologically. It was blessedly bi-lingual, the result of much American money helping to fund the museum. It's also brand new. The museum wisely does not just cover Schindler's factory, it includes the lives of Krakow Jews and Gentiles, the Ghetto and Krakow itself. The small rebellions of the Krakowians - tram operators giving away tickets or "forgetting" to take payments, the wealthy business owner greeting the young women and elderly men being forced by Nazis to shovel snow and ice with hot wine and kindness, the gentile children sent with extra food to toss out the windows when their tram went through the ghetto - and greater risks such as food smuggling (almost entirely taken up by women, and punishable by death) illuminate the hardships Poles suffered through during WWII while they waited in vain for some help from their "allies".

I did not take the popular daytrip from Krakow to Auschwitz. I have seen a concentration camp. Confronted with such inhumanity it's easy to become overwhelmed and unable to process the absolute horrors. When you visit a concentration camp and turn around you see homes, towns, markets, many of them built long before 1940, and you are reminded of the old saw (which is actually a quote from a movie, and not from some notable historical personage) that all it takes for evil to triumph is for good people to do nothing. With all due props to the Corrie Ten Booms and Miep Gies's of the world, experiencing this museum was a wake-up call that good can triumph so long as the flawed jack-asses of the world do something.

* the great, heaping irony of our trip was that the rudest, pushiest people anywhere seemed to be the Germans. I German woman shoved me and then nearly knocked TR - who was walking with a cane - over in the Auschwitz room at the Schindler museum. For shame!