Monday, February 11, 2008

Lesson of humanity

How would feel after seeing a place that it shouldn’t be meant to be visited. I couldn’t exactly describe what I felt after that. All I could say is that my senses were tired. I have abused of each of them, including my imagination along with my rational thinking. I have tried my maths, but still, my imagination rejected such scenarios. When you are talking about these numbers, one could hardly picture humans involved. The highest concentration of murders per square kilometer. I could hear them, smell them, feel them. What is more strange is that I could also taste. Every time I got into a building or a barrack there was this strange bitter taste in my mouth, that didn’t have anything to do with the sadness that accompanied every step of our visit. It's not the bitter taste in the back of your throat, it was genuine. Maybe this is how death tastes, and since that place was filled with it...
It has taught me a lesson, a lesson about death and about loosing your humanity. And I’m talking about both sides now. The only difference is that one side was forced into it while the other one possessed free will. I am curious how can one possibly continue their lives thinking of themselves as being human after doing that. Were there good persons amongst them, or they have been equally brainwashed and turned into such beasts. The good part is that their successors learned the best lesson from it. They are the ones that would understand this place best upon visiting it, on whose faces you would read terror after seeing and hearing about those things. They will always hold flowers that they will leave at memorials. This is why I totally disagree with most of Poles that cannot distinguish between Nazis and Germans and they ignorantly hate them equally. This is not how you will never learn lessons from history and on the contrary you risk repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
Nevertheless, this place should never be visited. It is the saddest page of our recent history, which I think we managed to turn a long time ago. Besides that, there are people that are too ignorant to understand anything from it. Fed with consumer’s society low quality fiction they cannot distinguish it from reality. And they love these kind of tragic (but not real, because they are not psychologically capable of coping with real tragic) stories so much that they want to connect their names with it. I can see no other explanation for people engraving their names in the walls of these barracks. Now here’s to all the people out there that like to do that:
I hope you are proud of what you did, at least I am very proud of sharing this world with people like you!

Saturday, February 2, 2008

Nightshopping

One thing that I love about Poland – nightshopping. Actually it would be the same in Romania. The only problem was that in Bucharest for example I didn’t have night transportation, which makes it difficult if you wanted to shop a bit further.
I tried to come up with explanations and this is the best one I could find - in the struggle of an unsaturated market to attract as many consumers as possible, no matter what the costs are for now, they keep stores open almost all the time. Which for me is great, since I have such a chaotic schedule. So it didn’t happen just once that I went to Tesco at 1am after getting back from a beer meeting. And then the shopping malls. During the week they are open until 10pm. And then there is Empik – what will you do if you want to buy a book at 10pm, or a DVD – not a problem. Clothing outlets open late even in the weekends, supermarkets open till 11pm and so on. This is nightshopping and I love it. I remember Italy. It took me so long to get used to the 3 hour midday break. Recently I was chatting with a friend of mine that lives in the Netherlands. It was on a Friday afternoon and she told me that she has to flee. She was going shopping because if she didn’t do it right away she couldn’t have bought anything until Monday.
Well, obviously not a problem here…