|
Temporary exhibition
HUDA JAMA (CAVE OF EVIL)
– POSSIBILITIES OF MUSEAL EXHIBITION
8th December 2009
to June 2010
Entering the burial and killing site in
the tunnel of St. Barbara was a break through for Slovenian
transcendence of Titoistic taboos.
Leaving aside the enormous global and
local response to the even, the basis for our discussion is the
thesis, that the murder of a great mass of prisoners of war and
civilians at the end of May and beginning of June, 1945, the
worse crime of all times on the territory of the Republic of
Slovenia.
It happened after the end of the War,
the victims were killed in an unimaginably cruel way in an
incredibly terrifying environment.
The executioners admitted the terrible
nature of the slaughter with an incomprehensible, one hundred
meter long, four hundred cubic meter big barrier with 11
partition walls, intended to hide the crime for ever.
Now the crime has been revealed. Careful
work of the mining team led by Mehmedalija Alić preserved the
cave in its terrifying expressiveness.
The next important steps were made
following the decisions of the investigating judge Milan Guček.
Working in incredibly difficult
conditions, the Forensic Institute team led by Tomaž Zupanc
inspected the mortal remains of the hundreds of victims in the
level between both pits and in a few meters of the first pit.
Jože Jagrič documented the events in the
cave.
Members of the criminalist project
Sprava (reconciliation) led by Pavle Jamnik gathered numerous
statements of people related to the crime. The criminalists sent
the items found in the cave to the Museum of Contemporary
History of Slovenia for treatment.
All of the above are a solid foundation
for the preparation of a museal presentation of the crime in the
St. Barbara tunnel.
They enable us to reconstruct at least a
part of the hellish events.
In the strained relations of the
dissolution of the greatest Titoistic taboo, the battle between
further concealment and revelation is fought also in the
discussions about continuing research and tending to the burial
and killing site in Huda Jama.
Let this booklet contribute to the
discussion.
The Ministry of Culture and its bodies
has not yet been able to declare the locations of biggest
Titoist crimes as cultural monuments: Teharje, burial sites in
Kočevski Rog, Tezno, Slovenska Bistrica, and of course the St.
Barbara tunnel in Huda Jama.
I feel that Huda Jama is as important as
Katyn. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote into one of the last
anthologies of documents about the Soviet massacre of Polish
officers in Katyn: “To this day, the Russian unwillingness to
completely break away from Stalin’s heritage is in sharp
contrast with the German complete condemnation of Hitlerism and
is a serious barrier not only for Polish-Russian reconciliation
but also for Russian identification with Europe.” And one of the
Polish researchers added his thoughts on the universality of
Katyn: “This is not only a story of a cruel crime going
unpunished. It is also a story about historical truth against
denial, about moral reactions against political cynicism. A part
of Polish history and a universal message.”
In Slovenia,
we have not completely broken away from Tito’s Stalinism and the
message of evil caves is a universal one.
Andrzej Wajda’s father, Jakub Wajda, was
killed in Katyn. Wajda feels that the movie on Katyn is a story
of families forever torn apart, of a great lie, of terrible
truth. It is a movie about suffering of individuals and not of
omnipresent politics. That is why Wajda avoided answered
questions and conjured images with much greater emotional weight.
Ana’s behaviour reminds Wajda of his mother Aniela: she could
never accept the fact that dad would never come back from the
War, never stopped looking for smallest signs to validate her
hope.
That is why Wajda wrote the script as a
personal story. In it, the heroes are not dying men, but women,
waiting, hoping, every day, every moment, surviving suffering
and the expectations of return. Let this hope be the story of
the movie – faithful and steadfast almost certain that it is
simply enough to open the door, and there he is – husband and
father!
If the response of the protectors of the
taboo to Huda Jama is eerily Stalinistic, the resistance of
faithfulness and hope is also similar to Wajda’s. A trickle of
questions from Austria, Germany,
Croatia, Serbia, Montenegro, hopeful guesses whether
their father, grandfather might be a victim of Huda Jama.
Personal questions, family tragedies. Waiting to be written down,
made into art.
Wajda estimates that in the artistic
responses to the Katyn crime only one song and one composition
are worth more than the rest. A poor harvest for a great crime
and great nature? Totalitarian taboos do not only kill people,
but also repress their humanity, creativity, compassion,
solidarity
The future should bring new art to
complement the moving testimonies of recordings and items from
the tunnel of St. Barbara.
Text by: Jože Dežman
................................................................................................
Contact
Jože Dežman
e.
jdezman@muzej-nz.si
t. 01 300 96 10
|
