Genocide out of sight, out of mind

Defining ‘The Zone of Interest’

(This piece originally appeared on my Substack, Artless. Subscribe to that here.)

Across the Vistula river on the Józef Piłsudski Bridge are tenement buildings in pastel shades of lemon, orange and brown, leading to the terracotta-pink walls and teal spire of St Joseph’s Church. For a time it must’ve seemed less a church than a crenellated fortress, built as it was in the Gothic Revival style with studded roofs and serrated pinnacles, and looming as it did over the south-west corner of Kraków’s Jewish Ghetto. Through there it’s a short walk down tree-lined streets to the branch of the Historical Museum housed in Oskar Schindler’s enamelware factory.

It gets a lot of visitors — rarely are you out of earshot of guides with their speeches or tour-groups with their questions or that shifting, oppressive clamour of reenacted dialogues and archive footage played off speakers and screens. So it’s not untoward that the reception of the museum has over a door, or did when I went five years ago, an electronic counter of visitors currently inside and queue waiting time. But you can also see why people might be reminded of where else you get that sort of counter: tourist attractions, theme parks. Near the end of the museum walk-through the floor roughens and undulates to mimic the terrain…