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![Life in war Life in war](./data/thumbnails/253/_MG_0400_-_E1_-_E1.jpg) Life in war
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When the Nazis built the Plaszow concentration camp just outside the city center of Krakow, they built it on a Jewish cemetery. Today only one gravestone remains.
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Before World War II, Jews made up 10% of the Polish population and more than 50% of many small towns; one in three people in Warsaw was a Jew. Similarly, Kazimierz, the Jewish quarter of Krakow since the middle ages, was home in 1939 to 45,000 Jews.
But while Nazi extermination and subsequent Soviet brutalities emptied Poland almost completely of Jews, the void that was left behind has become the site of a sudden boom in commercial ?Jewish culture.? For some this new growth can seem parasitic, systematic of the rise of capitalism and consumer culture after communism. But what appears at first glance to be a tourist Disneyland hides one country?s ? and two peoples? ? attempts to come to terms with the traumatic past.
Popular interest in Jewish culture among local non-Jews ranges from a genuine intention to restore and maintain the remains of Jewish heritage, to the opportunistic drive to profit from the sale of an entirely virtual Jewish world. Jews, who flock to Poland seeking lost pasts, both horrific and nostalgic, find themselves accidental tourists, with the accompanying ?baggage? of an industry based on comfort, leisure, and a packaged encounter with difference. What becomes of the memory of tragedy, the history of violence and hatred, in a global commercial age, when history and culture are toured, bought, sold, consumed?
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Date: |
02.11.2007 11:28 |
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