East to Auschwitz and Krakow Teatru Stu: Blog 80

Dzień dobry

Teatru Stu

I am waking up this morning in a guest room at Teatru Stu in Krakow. Maciej's network of theatre friends has meant we got these rooms for free!

It’s a beautiful small theatre in the centre of the city that still has the feeling of the thirties. From the window you can see the castle looming over the city. I rather like the idea that a theatre has its own guest rooms, great for putting up travelling companies and a good source of secondary income. I can’t imagine such a thing in the UK, and I am not quite sure what it reveals about the polish mentality but this small theatre in the centre of the city feels deeply embedded in its community (oops just seen the pun!)

Maciej - Cultural Strategist

Yesterday we travelled East from Wroclaw to Oświęcim - Auschwitz. I wanted to visit the concentration camp again to renew and refresh my connection with the earlier strange visit in 1981 during which I got locked in. 

The ground was covered in snow, unexpected for early April, but which has much of northern Europe in its grip including London. 

Birkenau

We went into Birkenau first, and of course its now a carefully preserved museum with large groups of people guided round the huts and chimneys and the railway tracks. 

The landscape is vast and uniform with rows of chimneys standing alone where the wooden huts have long gone. They stand to attention, defiant. 

Maciej tells me that there might be plans to reconstruct all the huts around these chimneys to give a full sense of the scale of the camp. Dreadful idea I think. There is a real danger that it could become some morbid theme park, maybe in a way it is already. The chimneys are open wounds, and there is raw energy as you walk past them that allows your own imagination to fill in the missing bits. I really struggle with understanding why one would want to fabricate it.

Maciej and I were lone visitors, we didn’t want to attach to any guided tours and soon we realised that neither of us had been to Birkenau on our last trip here. We decided after an hour or so at Birkenau we didn’t fancy the walk to Auschwitz 1 along the railway track, besides I had really put the wrong foot wear on again!

Birkenau

So we jumped in the hire car and headed towards Auschwitz 1. Surprisingly and perhaps comfortingly in light of my theme park fears, there is no fee to get into the museum. I don’t like the use of the word museum really for this place and I am not entirely sure why. The energy and pain permeate the atmosphere densely and it feels oddly vital. This of course is also the power that our individual imaginations bring to the place. 

Its unfathomable to experience the meticulous organisation and patterns of the Nazi regime in which real human beings were subjected to the cruellest of collective bullying. We’ve all seen the images, they are burned in our imaginations, and yet the private calculations are there for each in our own way when we visit.

There are many quotes around the place ‘lest we forget’, and how this experience must remind us that we need to learn from history. The sad truth I fear is that we don’t actually, and human pathological fear still leads to atrocities that are unspeakable across the world. The specifics of another holocaust appear disconnected with the truths and imperatives of a new struggle or war. And so we do it again. Maybe in the moment of being somewhere like Auschwitz there is an immediate access to our own fear and potential for rage and cruelty that is salient, who knows.

Block 11

Death Wall - Block 11

Block 11 is the Death block, and it’s the one that had most impact on me back in 1981. It still does. The standing cells, the starvation cells, the shooting wall, the basins for the prisoner’s last wash before execution all hold their saturated secrets of ripped out lives. Standing by the wall, there is no escape from the truth of organised and self justifying murder, there is no excuse.

Restaurant Under the Rams

I had had enough by then and we left pretty quickly without going into the gas chambers. We went to a small restaurant some miles up the road and had a bowl of cabbage soup, very warm if a little fatty. The rest of the journey to Krakow was in silence.

Arriving here at the theatre at about 7pm, we dumped our stuff and went out for a meal in a great restaurant ‘Under the Rams’ Restauracia Baranem, within the skirts of the lady castle. 



As with our other visits to cafes over the past few days, once again I am struck by how art is just everywhere, walls covered in original paintings, sculpture and music. Its just part of the everyday, and its rich with soul.

The food was fabulous too, I had an amazing garlic soup followed by barbakan steak with warm beetroot and finished off with a crème brule. Maciej had venison and cognac triple layer cake. The whole meal cost less than £60, which was surprisingly kind for the quality!

Very lovely menu!

Over dinner conversation flourished again. Its curious how memory distorts and changes detail over time, and how coming back here I discover that Maciej holds chapters of my life in safekeeping for me. I hadn't realised that this trip was also to be a retrieval exercise. As we talk he brings back to my memory some long lost stories that flourish again the minute he starts talking.

There is an opening night of Romeo and Juliet at Teatru Stu tonight but we have reluctantly decided to miss that to travel back the 300 km to Wroclaw to meet Lech about a possible artistic collaboration and also a meeting planned with the director of Wroclaw European Year of Culture 2016.

Wifi and breakfast in the Jewish Quarter first.