If I ever get famous, the one photo I probably wouldn’t like published is the one of me holding the AK47.
I’ll tell you the story anyway. It was 2002 and I was in Vietnam. On my tour from Saigon up to the middle of the country Vietnam War was part of the tourist trail. So at the Cu Chi tunnels I was the only one of our tour group to pay USD$1 for a bullet to shoot at a target. A Canadian guy of Vietnamese origin in our group was disgusted with me.
In the previous weeks I had visited the Killing Fields and Genocide museum in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. It was my birthday. On my return to my hotel that day the hotel manager, also in her 20s asked, as usual how was your day? When I told her she said that her parents had died there. I also went to some landmine museum near Angkor Wat at Siem Reap.
Next stop Ho Chi Minh City where we visited the War Remnants museum on the anniversary of the Americans landing, then onto the Vietnamese demilitarized zone (DMZ) and the Cu Chi tunnels.
Four years ago I visited Dachau, near Munich. I remember it was a crisp cold, beautifully bright October day. The kind of day and location that makes me think of that Graham Greene Our Man in Havana quote: “It is easy to laugh at the idea of torture on a sunny day.”
So this week the focus is on Auschwitz. Myself and a few friends are going. I’m going because they’re going, and some of us feel we have to go because we’re close to there. Until today I was okay about it, I’ve read Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, I was relatively unmoved by Dachau, but there’s a context to that which I won’t go into.
I also was at Ground Zero, something I’d forgotten until I found a photo.
I had forgotten, until I sat down to write something about the impending Auschwitz trip that I had been to so many other memorials to man’s inhumanity to man.
People had advised don’t go there. I’m finally feeling the dread, with just three sleeps to go. My belief had been that to know about these things can help bring the knowledge to future generations spread farther afield. But what have my other visits given me?
Cambodia: I see the hotel manager telling me sadly that her parents had died there. It felt me feel like shit, as I was making a tourist attraction, a day out, of what her family had gone through.
Vietnam: I remember the disappointment of my fellow traveller who had been telling me about the writings of Thich Nhat Han before I spared a dollar for a shot of an AK47. One other thing that stands out from the museum in Saigon is the damage that Agent Orange did.
Ground Zero: the sheer size of that hole in the ground. It lent something to the size of the horror.
Dachau: this made me realise while you can have horror in one place, you can also have horror and suffering elsewhere. It continues to exist and be perpetrated in many different ways, in many different cultures, to individuals and groups, to the mind.
Auschwitz: is this one I will bring home with me? I don’t know.
