keys and locks from the German border land

I watched an interview with a lock picker on BBC http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-14924443 and was very touched by his philosophical view of lock picking - as a key to unlock human history. And it reminded my experience at Silesian Museum in Goritz where I visited recently.

Gorlitz is a German city bordering Poland. The museum is devoted to the region called Silesia, a former German territory before the war. Silesia became a part of Poland after WWII when the borders were redrawn by the victors. All the Germans who inhabited Silesia were expelled and relocated in other parts of Germany or emigrated to other continents such as US and Canada. The Poles who were also expelled from their eastern territory - nowaday Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus - moved in.

Goritz was a western edge of Silesia and remained in German territory (at that time it was Eastern Germany). The museum was established after the German Unification and tells the story of Silesia which is no longer German but ringers in memories of many people who left their land of ancestors.

One area of the exhibition especially caught my eyes - numerous keys and locks, which were donated by people who left their homes in Silesia in 1945. When they were expelled they thought it was temporary and that they would be moving back after the war ends. So they locked their houses and took keys with them while fleeing with nothing more than their suitcases and toys. A lock to a library of Breslau University was also exhibited. One of the university employee locked the library and took it with him upon evacuation. The cold war ended, and the border stayed the same. Silesians' dream of going home faded. The museum exhibition explains that when people were getting old and realized that they are no longer going back home, they brought those keys and locks to the museum and had a sense of relief and closure. I thought it was a sad but beautiful story.

If you look around the world, how many are those people with keys which don't unlock their houses anymore? The daily conflicts in many parts of the world keep producing such people yet still.

Busy Month September

We went to a city in the southwestern tip of Poland called Zgorzelec on Septermber 8 Thursday. It was a part of a German city called Gorlitz (Goelitz), but after 1945 it was divided in half, since the Nyse River which runs in the middle became the border. The western part belonged to DDR and the other Poland.

The western part has the old town, the main square, and old churches, while the Polish side is more residential and industrial. Zgorzelec also housed Stalag, prisoner-of-war camp during the WWII. Now these two cities are cooperating in many aspects. And people in both sides go to the other side freely, which was not imaginable until recently when Poland entered the Shengen area for EU citizens to cross borders without passport control.

CG Leipzig joined us and we did a joint visit of Gorlitz and Zgorzelec for three days. It was very interesting to see how the both cities, once a single city, now in different countries, but move forward in each way. Needless to say, Gorlitz side is inhabited by Germans and Zgorzelec by Polish population expelled from the former eastern territory of Poland of current Ukraine, Belorus, and Lithuania. The German side has a big concern of demography, since many young people left for the western part of Germany as is often the case in the depressed East. While the city itself was restored beautifully, the streets are rather empty.

Yesterday we attended the commemoration of 9/11 in Kielce. The city is known for Kielce Pogrom in 1946 and the current mayor who is in his third term is determined to come to term with the city's past and founded 9/11 monument pursuing the tolerance. That's why this monument stands there. Middle and high school students from all over Kielce gathered at the memorial site and brought candles with an individual's name perished in Ground Zero in New York, a total of 2600. Each student researched his/her victim's story and put the victim's name on the candle and carried to the monument. It was a very touching ceremony.

After visiting Auschwitz a friend from America mentioned that she felt that people should not dwell on these past issues and they should move on. I had been thinking about that. I came to think that in Poland those issues which happened during the WWII hadn't fully explained or reserached or discussed until quite recently. The communist government had its own interpretation of Nazism and the outcome of the war and even in Auschwitz the victims were never mentioned as Jews during the communist times. The very complex problems of Polish/Jewish history and interaction made it hard for the regime to look straight and tell what it really happened. The Auschwitz museum she visited is a new attempt and it only in 20 or so years of operation in this current form. Holocaust studies and Jewish studies were totally new topics here in Poland twenty years ago and they rapidly developed into the specialized field, which Poland attracts many scholars and reserchers. Poles are gradually allowed to examine and discuss things which had been taboo for such a long time, so it will take time for the not-so distant history's chapters to close.