Warsaw Part 2

Often when going through museums I find myself spending my time irregularly--minutes on pictures and seconds on text. I call it "going at my own pace," but what it really is, is me speeding through the parts that bore me and moving on to the interactive sections.

How do you react however, when your tour is being led by one of the men whom designed the gallery? There's no chance to speed ahead, only the opportunity to finally listen. The text and images on the walls of The Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews in Warsaw compliment each other in a way that leaves the story to draw the image, and conversely the picture can write the words. 

Professor Teller didn't begin his portion of the four and a half hour tour by simply restating the text written on the walls--he did what only the best of professors do and told us why the information is laid out in the way it is and why it needs to be remembered. The museum suddenly became less an abstract part of our ten day trip and more of a place I desired to absorb.

The extraordinarily detailed accounts of first person narratives of Jewish and Polish relations can only be felt at the museum itself, so I won't even attempt to summarize it here, because there is no summarizing that history. What I can attempt to do though is recount the extreme amount of detail that went into making the museum's interior decoration so vibrantly reinforce the stories inside. 

I'm currently in a class called Art of the Book, where I learn how the physical creation of a book can more effectively reflect its content. When we create our own books, we need to ask ourselves "why does this book need to exist in the realm of physical books, and why can it not be on the internet? Can it be a Buzzfeed Article?" 

The information in the Polin Museum, in theory, can be on the internet. A photo, and then click--some text. Another photo, and then some more text. What Professor Teller and the rest of the team behind Polin managed to create is a reason to ditch the screen and get off the couch, and travel 4,000 miles. They made Polish-Jewish history, as a series of events, a tangible experience that extends beyonds the classroom and beyond the history channel. 

In the museum, the roof of the synagogue model displayed the 12 zodiac signs. Underneath it, a touch-screen computer allows the user to click on the symbols and learn their significance to Judaism. That couldn't have been a buzzfeed article.

If you wanted to view some photos of Holocaust survivors, you had to "process" the photos in a shallow pool of virtual water. That couldn't be a buzzfeed article.

It was so dark at one point, that I had to squint when I walked through the entire section of 1939 to 1945. Not only was the room dark, but so was it's content and its spirit. 

Not every group can be lucky enough to have tour guides as thorough as Professor Teller and Joanna Ficus. That goes without saying. But for the first time in a museum, I didn't walk ahead. I stopped. I listened. I paid attention when I thought I knew what was going on. And for the first time in a very long time, I left a museum feeling like my soul had soaked up a thousand years of history.

Jake Moffett '15