1.2 Living dead history

I left the office and started walking home when that little inner voice of mine, my most precious travel companion, insisted that I take the longer way back. I was tired and didn’t particularly fancy walking extra miles along roads that I knew way too well and didn’t find any special. Yet I also knew that the travel hints of that little voice are never to be ignored and eventually never let me down.

Albeit reluctantly, I thus made a turn, put on my music and set off walking, waiting for the revelation behind this change of plans. A few hundred meters down the hill, I had already forgot this fuss about the revised itinerary, absorbed as I was into a new train of thoughts. I waited for the green lights, walked by a few shops, stopped at a crossing to let a car pass by when suddenly I noticed, right next to my feet,  those golden tiles on the ground. 

“Funny”, I thought. Just a couple of days earlier a colleague was telling me of how on the old districts of German cities one can find little stones placed there where former Jewish people, later tortured or killed by the Nazis, used to live. I must have walked across that small crossroad hundreds of time since I’ve moved to this place but never had I noticed those five little “Stolpersteine”, or  “stumbling blocks” as they are called in German.  

I immediately stepped to the side, careful not to be standing over them. It was not rationally thought of but rather a natural reaction, a gesture of human respect I guess, that pushed me to their side.

I took a picture of those golden tiles and read the information they bore. Each of them has the name, date of birth and deportation of a man or a woman that used to live in one of the buildings nearby. All of them bear the same final wording: “Ermordet”, “murdered”.

I found the scene to be quite surreal. 

Right there, underneath my feet, was the memorial of five human beings whose life had been abruptly and brutally truncated. I could smell the scent of personal life: five distinctive individual stories with individual dreams, aspirations and relations. “This must have been her husband, and this was her father in-law”-  my mind started off - “At that age he could have been a university student, or maybe a doctor”.  I read traces that related their life to mine.  
Meanwhile, in the “real life” around me, people were drinking and chatting and eating their greasy kebabs in one of the many Turkish food stores that dot the city (the same country that at the time of those tiles was boosting its Aryan superiority being now abundantly accounted for by Turkish and foreign immigrants). Everyone was so imbued with summer, and busy with their cocktails and cigarettes and oversize portions of food that a splurge of uneasiness took me over. There was something indecent in how contemporary life was indulging into its daily pettiness right next to those little monuments to victims of atrocities, as if oblivious and careless of the tragedy that was recalled just a few steps away.  

I resumed walking, together with my thoughts, ermordet always echoing in the back of my mind.

I kept thinking of the proximity of that history. 

The five in those golden tiles died in the early ’40s. This was seventy something years ago. This was some ten years before my parents were born. 
This was no dinosaur history. 
It’s been grandparents or parents of people that now live, walk, work around me that wrote that chapter of history, so vivid and fresh a chapter that I could almost still see its stains of blood, smell its corpse still rotting.

Then I looked at the state of the world around me: Syria, Libya, Iraq, Central Africa and Ukraine. It’s a list that unfortunately goes on at length. 

Humanity has not done its history homework yet. 

And in a most cruel mock of fate, it is a war in the Middle East that is topping the newspapers headlines these days. That same ethnicity that those golden tiles are paying homage to is perpetrating one of the worst atrocities at present.

 “Will it ever be enough?”asked my little voice.

For that night I went to the bed with that question, a part of me giving in to the hopelessness of human nature.