Bystanders, Besides
We live in a place where the APOCALYPSE of the 20th century happened.
In our everyday lives we see its traces.
Eight tracks are eight people’s stories.
These are our very personal emotions
that we faced fully aware that
AUSCHWITZ
took place on our land.
Our place on Earth is Oświęcim and its neighborhood.
World War II marked the local population with a stigma of closeness of the German Nazi death camp, KL Auschwitz-Birkenau. Many of them were the first victims of ethnic cleansing, evictions and repressions. Their fields and meadows became the zone of the camp’s interests, and the bricks from their demolished houses were used to build prisoners’ barracks. As a result, they not only lost their inheritance, but often also freedom, and even their lives. Those who were allowed to stay here became witnesses of the collapse of the civilized world, brutality and murder of thousands of innocent people from all over the Europe.
Many of them refused to be passive witnesses. From the very beginning, at first a little chaotic, individually, then in more organized way, they tried to help the prisoners behind the wires. Getting food or medicine was close to a miracle and often meant reducing own, modest and regulated by the Germans, food rations. Without their help, prisoners would not be able to escape. Risk taken resulted in repressions, imprisonment or death, sometimes of the entire families. Some became Auschwitz prisoners and died in the camp, just a few kilometers from their own homes. After the liberation, they immediately took care of the exhausted prisoners, helping to organize the necessary help, often taking them to their homes.
Generations are passing away, but we still live here with the heritage of the place and the traces of tragic human stories, left here in the form of victims’ ashes, their testimonies and artifacts.
We chose eight stories describing the specific events and the fates of people and we made an attempt to share via our music all the emotions inspired by them. We want to show this place from our perspective; us – the inhabitants of this land. The land, which became a symbolic cemetery of the modern world, where people were buried together with fundamental human values. It is also our attempt to face own emotions, horror, misunderstanding, powerlessness in front of mass and anonymous death. It is also a reflection about condition of the human being in a universal dimension, his capacity for acts of unbelievable cruelty and gestures of real sacrifice.
This is an expression of our disagreement to “tame” memory. Our disagreement with indifference, silence, omnipresent hate.