Flying to the past, to try and understand the future
It has been an incredible few days. A volcano closes our skies and forces us to sit back and consider some of the assumptions we base our busy, scheduled lives upon and then in true human nature within 24 hours of airplanes being back in the skies we seem to have forgotten it all and erased that moment of pause from our minds. In the rush to get back to normal (which everyone wants, particularly the airlines) perhaps there are a couple of things we can take with us from that force of nature. In many ways the events of ash week underscores one of the fundamental truths of our human lives - the need to be flexible, adapt and change, in order to survive. We go through live denying our fragility in the hope that if we deny it we may be safe. Yet embracing our fragility and the inherent fluidity of everything around us is at the basis of resilience. Our world is not permanent, our lives are mere moments in the arc of nature and we are not always in control. News reporters (like RTÉ special correspondent) describing passengers as experiencing ‘a long ordeal of hell’ after just three days waiting for a flight out of New York airport seem not just to lack any sense of perspective but equally any sense of man’s relationship to the world. The ‘trauma’ of western passengers waiting for flights in cities like Rome, Barcelona and New York, filled our TV and radio programmes while the stories of developing world farmers who had to destroy their crops, unable to get them into European markets, was less interesting.
Hell is relative. We had flights to Krakow booked for some months on Friday just as the airlines were getting back to normal. Once the flight was confirmed we decided to go. The visit was a chance to re-connect with friends who had been history students in UCD many years ago and make a visit to one of the most dramatic places of human history, the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz. Krakow was itself in deep national mourning after the funeral of the President and his wife, killed in the plane crash on route to honour another national tragedy the massacre of over 10,000 Polish soldiers by the Soivets during WW2. At Auschwitz nothing you know from history can really prepare you for the sense of horror at the reality and scale, the minute detail, of the Nazi’s genocide. All the techniques of master project management, business efficiency and cost effectiveness turned to the use of human beings as tortured slaves in a vast war machine. Yet that extremity is part of mankind and we distance ourselves from understanding it at the peril of repeating it. Leaving the camp I bought and began re-reading Primo Levi’s account of life there ‘If this is a man’. The Italian chemist was one of just three Italians to survive the camp and his insight into his year there, and how both inmates and captors adapted to the camp, is enlightening.
But why do I connect the two events? Because sometimes planes, and the ease and rapidity of our modern world can make us feel very distant from our past. A hundred years can seem a long time to everyone except a volcano. Yet Auschwitz is a mere generation away. For most of us its our parents or grandparents time. We know the failure to know history is to living through it again and Levi reminds us that the impulse that drove Auschwitz is the same one which on a small more personal scale drives all hatred of ‘the other’ and in Ireland has recently lead to the death of two Polish workers and a young Irish-Nigerian man. Xenophobia, racism, homophobia - all those ways we categorise people who are ‘not us’ is the beginning of our nature which created in its extremity Auschwitz and all the other camps of destruction both then and now across the world.
The planes are flying again, the airlines are rushing us all to forget the strange week when we were still, and yet maybe we should cherish the moment, the pause and let it remind us of where we come from, who we are and just where we are all rushing to in such a hurry.
The volcano exposed how little we know about our world. It challenged us to discover more, to be open to learning and to learn from our past. After all if we had we would have expected the eruptions and been prepared. We now know, for sure, it will happen again, in our lifetimes and in those of the next generation to come. In a sense Auschwitz challenges us as well. It challenges us to see ourselves in it and to learn from it and the misery it presents. If we don’t, if we see it only as the product of one people, one time, we risk inflicting it again, suffering it again, as either the torturers or the victims. We can be both, we can be either. The question is what have we learnt? What do we carry into our future?