I think that’s it. I can’t go to war museums anymore.
Today I added the Edinburgh War Museum to a morbid list of conflict related exhibitions that is really, becoming rather extensive. Within a matter of months I’ve attended: the Tuol Sleng Genocide Museum in Cambodia, the Moscow Contemporary History Museum (which actually just focuses on wars and revolutions), and the Imperial War Museum in London (which included special Holocaust and Genocide sections). I’ve also been to the Hiroshima Peace Park Museum at least three times in my life, to the cities of Uzbekistan and China to hear the tales about Genghis Khan and Timur Lane – the ‘mighty’ conquerors who are responsible for the deaths of millions – and recently visited Montenegro and Croatia where I was inundated with information about the conflict there that led to the division of what was Yugoslavia. I also satisfied my bizarre obsession with religious martyrs, violence, and relics of the Saints, by attending the special exhibition at the British Museum that is currently running. Ooh, and I forgot Pompeii and Herculaneum, where thousands were buried or suffocated by the ash and gas of the erupting Mt Vesuvius.
You haven’t even been to Auschwitz yet, I hear you say, or even the Holocaust Museum in Melbourne. No, I haven’t, and you know what – despite my usual assertions that the past must be learnt, the children of now need to know the gruesome acts that were committed long (and not so long) ago, and how to learn about these atrocities I must face them with strength and soak up all the information on offer and all that…
I just don’t think I can.
Sometimes I wake up feeling as though I am in a puddle. Just sitting there. Not happy, not sad, just here. I have a wonderful life, I am lucky, and I am healthy. But sometimes I just feel like shit.
Today I was almost out of the War Museum which is a part of the Edinburgh Castle, a magnificent, historically rich, living monument, and I came across the first item to have been exhibited there. A small pocket bible, which was being carried by a Scottish soldier, while he was fighting in a war the Scots didn’t even want to be a part of, but had to follow England into. He was shot, by a German soldier, who then sent the bible to the family of the man he had killed. I read the small ticket about the item, and walked outside. I felt sick. Like I would actually throw up.
I think that bible was the mouse that sank the boat, the straw that broke the camel’s back, the thing that sent me over the edge.
Last week, after watching the special Genocide movie playing in the Imperial War Museum in London, and playing with the awesome interactive screens that took you through every Genocide event that has occurred since 1500 and something, we took on the Holocaust section.
At first it was so interesting, stimulating, and morbidly amazing. My religious interest was excited by the history of Jewish victimisation, and then my interest in Genetics thoroughly intrigued by the Nazi ideas of making the perfect race, through breeding, physiognomy, eye colour, hair colour etc.
Then it gets weird, painful, shocking. Moreover, confusing. How did this happen? How could they euthanize sick people, old people, mentally and physically disabled people? I’m not even at the piles of bodies and the room of shoes yet. But I’m sickened and confused. I literally cannot understand how a man dreamed of making the perfect race, by forced ‘natural selection’, and other humans decided to play along.
There was a timely exit situated just as we were coming to when Germany invaded Poland. It was perhaps three quarters of the way through the exhibition. Another couple left prematurely ahead of us, the woman wiping her eyes as we followed them out.
Lighten up, I hear you say, have an avocado! Get some sunshine! You’ve got it great! The world is wonderful!
I just think, I’ve had enough of the sad bits of history and the depressing bits of the world. My war buff boyfriend can go into these museums by himself, and I am going to find somewhere else to visit.
Where can I find a museum of fun?
P.S. Don't Tell Mum 