Yes, tourists tend to be noisy, because travel is a form of celebration. But amidst the grim 472 acres of Auschwitz that teems with ghosts, even the most exuberant selfie-taker becomes sombre. Anyone who visits the Jallianwala Bagh monument would feel the same bleakness; the spectral touches of innocent phantoms insolvent in eternal despair tugging at their sleeves, whispering, pleading, not to be forgotten.
Reproduced below is an account of Ratan Devi, a survivor of the massacre, “I saw other people at the Bagh in search of their relatives. I passed my whole night there. It is impossible for me to describe what I felt. Heaps of dead bodies lay there, some on their backs and some with their faces upturned. A number of them were poor innocent children. I shall never forget the sight. I was all alone the whole night in that solitary jungle. Nothing but the barking of dogs, or the braying of donkeys was audible. Amidst hundreds of corpses, I passed my night, crying and watching. I cannot say more.
What I experienced that night is known to me and to God.” From 1940 through 1945, the Nazis exterminated over 1.1 million men, women and children, mostly Jews in the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and death camp. Reproduced here is an account by Janina Iwanska, a survivor of the genocide, “We were taken off the train at night, and the air was thick with smoke that smelled like burning hair. We walked through a forest and I asked a prisoner, ‘What are those bonfires?’ and she said, ‘You’ll find out, child.’ It was only later that I learned they were burning bodies because they couldn’t keep up with the crematoriums alone.”
There are monuments to the innocent dead at Jallianwala Bagh, Auschwitz, Babi Yar, Nanjing, My Lai, which are sites of mass murder by marauding empires. There are stone figures writhing in frozen pain and powerful sculptures of suffering and triumph. Each memorial perforce imposes silence; the instinctive stillness of homage. The Holocaust Museum has artifacts of man’s infinite capacity for evil; the casting of an iron gas chamber door, a striped uniform of a Jewish prisoner, a child’s doll. Then there are the rows and rows of photographs of the murdered in ascending, circular order—men, women and children with hope and laughter on their faces, a shy smile on a young maiden’s face here and a grave expression on a child’s face there, all unaware of their monstrous future.
The Partition Museum in Amritsar is an evolving project with more and more stories and oral histories being added to its existing repository. The exhibits are deeply moving but tragically commonplace in context—personal objects Hindu and Sikh refugees fleeing Pakistan brought with them such as a wedding sari, a jewellery box and sketches by a refugee artist who witnessed the horrors of sundering. Such places are spaces of silence, of contemplation and introspection that urge you to face the darkness of the soul.
They are not spaces of celebration. They are not places where the eternal echoes of the dying are drowned by pyrotechnic music, where the .303 muzzle flashes of British soldiers are obscured by a Disneyesque son et lumiere, where the well whose water turns blood red in Amritsari sunsets is covered over by transparent sheeting. All that is missing at the renovated Jallianwala Bagh Memorial is Mika doing bhangra and Jaswinder Bhalla cracking risqué jokes. Someone whose sense of history is more Broadway musical than India Gate forgot that a memorial is a place of meditation, not celebration. If this is how our current historical aesthetic rewrites the story of martyrs, what is next? Raj Ghat?