Until a short while ago, the only
association I had with the name Guernica -- or Gernika, the town’s official
Basque name -- was the famous huge painting by Pablo Picasso. I first saw it on
our trip to Spain in February 1999, at the Reina Sofia
Museum in Madrid. It was awesome in the original sense of the word, i.e.,
truly awe-inspiring. And scary and heartbreaking. The kind of art that can give
you nightmares if you look at it carefully, at length.
Then, just recently, we watched Season 2 of the TV series Genius.
The 10 episodes of this season were dedicated to Pablo Picasso. Though I’m sure
some will find fault with the series, I found it interesting and well-made, and
it filled a few gaps in my education. Though the series didn’t go into the
story of the bombing of Gernika at great length, it did provide some background,
and even made me curious to find out more.
Anyway, when we were planning our trip, the
first company we consulted (but ended up not hiring – too expensive) suggested
popping over to the town
of Gernika-Lumo as part of our route. So we did.
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| Gernika, Oct 2018 |
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| Gernika, Oct 2018 |
We were given to understand that the main
point of going to Gernika was to visit the Museum of Peace. So we
parked our rented car among all the other cars on one of the main streets, and
went to the museum.
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| Museum of Peace, Gernika |
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| Museum of Peace, Gernika |
War museums are designed to be unsettling,
I suppose. But the trick isn’t to say that war is hell; that’s been said and
shown in countless novels, documentaries, and movies – War and Peace, All Quiet
on the Western Front, The Longest Day – to name but a few well-known ones; and more
recently, the TV
series Sharpe which, though riveting, caused me to leave the room every
once in a while, when the cruelty and bloodshed got too much for me. (My son
dissuaded me from reading the books,
saying they are even more gory…) Here’s the series’ theme song.
(Apologies. I’m a Sharpe fan.)
In January 2017 we
toured Vietnam. When in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), we went to the War Remnants Museum.
Keep in mind that, if you Google “Vietnam War Museum” you’ll reach an American
website of a museum in Texas… For the Vietnamese, it was “the American War”. A
matter of perspective, obviously. Anyway – I’m afraid I didn’t have much
patience for all the blood-curdling photos and relics. (Unlike my American
cousin who felt morally obligated to scrutinize and contemplate the displays.) I
know what war is. I was born on a kibbutz in pre-State Israel and lived through
all of Israel’s wars. In fact – I’m lucky to be alive: the nursery that housed
the kibbutz babies was bombed by Egypt the very day after we, the babies, were
evacuated…
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| Babies' nursery, kibbutz Hatzor, 1948 |
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| Kibbutz Hatzor dining room, 1948 |
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| Kibbutz Hatzor living quarters, 1948 |
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| Kibbutz Hatzor public toilets, 1948 (there were no private toilets!) |
Later, in the IDF, I didn’t serve on the front lines… But my
then-husband did; and some of my school friends never made it back alive. I’d
like to believe that anyone who has lived through a war would be ardently
pro-peace. Sadly, this does not seem to be the case.
But I digress. The whole idea of the Peace
Museum is not to commemorate war, but rather to encourage and extol peace. As
one visitor wrote: “I was touched by the initiative to promote peace rather to
condemn war”.*
Which doesn’t mean that the Museum
completely refrains from touching that [exposed] nerve called The Horror of
War. They have a short audio-visual show that places you in the pleasant, comfy
home of a family, where you sit listening to a very convincing narrator
representing the mother of the family… when suddenly the siren sounds, the
bombers fly overhead, the bombs fall, and the next moment you’re sitting in a
pile of ruins. It made me sick to my stomach.
It also reminded me of a TV series we watched recently,
based on Terry
Pratchett’s Johnny and the Bomb, a novel for young readers. Though the main
theme may be time travel, the parallel theme is war, and the way it affects
civilians: ordinary people living in an ordinary town. You know – like Gernika,
or Coventry, or [insert city name of your choice.] I think a film like that is
perfectly in keeping with the Peace Museum, whose entire objective is to
encourage people from all over the world to work for peace. One cannot travel
in time; we can’t change the past. But changing the route that leads to a
future of war is still a possibility. Or is it simply an ineradicable feature
of the human race?
* Thing Thing
Lee, contributor to Google Maps
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