As it happens, the exhibition to commemorate the seventieth anniversary of the assassination of Reichsprotektor Reinhard Heydrich, organized by the civic association Paměť národa, may not be the most shocking invocation of the tragic occupation of the “Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia” in recent memory. I can still recall, two decades on, the swastika banners left hanging from the Prague City Library one spring evening in 1992, the legacy of a World War II film whose name now escapes me. Back then, of course, it was the utter indifference of the film crew that was far more disturbing: the lack of any explanation, the utter disregard for the city as public sphere (and not low-cost backdrop), the thinly veiled contempt for human sensibilities and historical memory. Absolutely nothing of the kind holds true for this year’s public exhibit, with its clear position in time (the anniversary of the events described) and space (the proximity of the Church of SS. Cyril and Methodius, where the remaining parachutists made their heroic last stand). Yet the miniature KZ-Lager below the spring foliage is nonetheless a disturbing image – undoubtedly valuable in the questions that it brings up, indeed perhaps one of the most successful temporary architectonic interventions that Prague has recently witnessed – and it is worth reflecting why this is so.
Trivialization has, of course, long been the greatest taboo in any discussion of Europe’s genocide-era: from the internet trolls vehemently invoking (and then blithely violating) Godwin’s Law to the heated debates over any mass-culture representation of the events; from the pupil scrawling swastikas over the headmaster’s photograph to the dilemma, perhaps irresolvable, of whether the twisted pseudoscience of the Nazi genocide can truly be compared to the ‘biocide’ of Communism in its extreme forms (Stalin, Pol Pot). And the specter of trivialization is clearly what lies behind, for instance, such efforts as Polish artist Zbigniew Libera’s creation of a death-camp using Lego figurines. Yet at the same time, could it not possibly be arguable – as a few have suggested – that even the documents regarded as the highest possible degree of authenticity, the narratives of the survivors, themselves represent a reduction, an amelioration, a lightening of the horror? For as we all assume, every first-person narrative, particularly if ‘non-fiction’, is inevitably the guarantee that the tale will provide us with something resembling a happy ending – we know that our protagonist will survive, but no stories have ever been related by the many more who did not.
A long queue snakes from the gate almost to the steps of St. Ignatius: long, but extremely well behaved, none of the stomach-turning clowning that occurs all too often at Auschwitz, now that the low-cost airlines have discovered Krakow. Once inside, the path leads along wire fences (not barbed or electrified) into the wooden enclosure, and the succession of three ‘barracks’. The walls, still faintly smelling of construction-grade pine, display simple panels either relating the events – Operation Anthropoid, the arrival of the parachutists, the assassination, the search for the parachutists, their betrayal and last fight, the reprisals, the annihilation of the villages Lidice and Ležáky – or the portraits and stories of all those associated with the events of 1942. Inside the first two barracks, the only sounds are the actual voices of the surviving witnesses, taken from the immensely valuable recording project that Paměť národa has been conducting for several years now; the final barrack, in notable contrast, resounds to the stiff mechanical Orwellian ‘duckspeak’ of a collaborationist newsreel, calling upon the ‘patriotic Czech public’ to turn in Heydrich’s assassins. The material evidence cast away by Kubiš and Gabčík in their flight is projected dispassionately on the screen: ‘a briefcase of imitation crocodile pattern, inexpertly repaired…’; if we read through the panels at a regular pace, the phrases from the newsreel follow again and again, in the unthinking repetition that forms one of the most effective weapons that a totalitarian state has against those whose lives it spares. Last of all, there is the open courtyard: the firing range, whether Mauthausen, Kobylisy, or wherever else the lives ended of the majority of those whose faces we have just viewed. Several funeral candles in the traditional red-plastic lanterns stand in the gravel, beneath the wall listing the dates of the executions.
Emerging back into the clatter and banality of the present day, I am struck by how effective the presentation has been. Paměť národa has performed an exceptional task with this public exhibit, perhaps on a smaller scale than its weekly radio series of interviews with the survivors of both tyrannies, ‘Tales of the Twentieth Century’, but no less crucial. Inside the ‘object’, the designers managed – rarely enough in contemporary architectonic creation – to create a genuine space of meditation, of reflection: a space where the unquestionable heroism of Gabčík and Kubiš, the treachery of Čurda, the tragedy of the many others murdered for the most trivial connections to the case, and the unspeakable martyrdom of the children sent to the gas-vans of Chelmno could all speak for themselves. No single grand interpretation is proposed – and consequently, there is no need to reinforce it with an entire range of vulgar effects – sinister B-movie organ drones, attendants in SS gear and the like. (The contrast, for example, with Budapest’s ‘Terror House’ could not be greater.) Not the crassness of 20th-century history as a Haunted Castle ride; perhaps even more disturbing is the realization that the spring of seventy years ago did consist of spring days much like today, and that the heroes, villains, traitors and victims were not insensate figurines filling in their given places in a drama scripted by superhuman theological forces but as individual as each of us, here at that same place many decades on. And perhaps, in the end, it is this aspect that takes us back to the start of the discussion, to the question of – only slightly to misquote Imre Kértesz – this ‘lovely concentration camp’.
Yes: the resemblance of the exhibition structure to a ‘Mauthausen playhouse’ is, in the final analysis, most appropriate in its inappropriateness. Not a trivialization – but a necessary reminder that the evil of the past was once all too much a matter of a materially ordinary present, a present that had none of those filters of dark creepshow glamour, expensive props, or ulterior moralizing that we like so much today. However we might react with distaste to the sight of a swastika across from the former plinth of the world’s largest soap-bubble machine, we need to keep in our minds that the very same park, no less beautiful in its towering summer foliage seventy years ago, was then surrounded with the notification ‘Juden nicht zugänglich – Židům nepřístupno’, and if we are to recall this even less comfortable memory, perhaps the few quibbles induced by an ugly grey hate-symbol from construction-grade pine may be a small price to pay.