Bratislava: a place of heavy air

Dirty, gray and full of graffiti tags, Bratislava’s post-soviet look carries an air of nostalgia and suffering which is not cleaned nor relieved yet. Architecture is a mix of 1970s to present buildings. Some modernist such as the inverted pyramid of the radio station, all the way back to medieval structures still incrusted within the city reminding us that even though Slovakia is a relatively new constituted country, its physical environment has a much longer history.

Like in other small European towns, the castles, government buildings or palaces -the elite- is literally above the people, in the highest hill or the highest part of the city like if overseeing the people… sometimes protecting them, sometimes controlling them.

One breathes heavy air in a city that still carries in the soul the weight of Nazi atrocities. It is common to find metal plaques around the city in memory of persons or families that were sent to concentration camps. There is one metal plaque of an artist called Adolf Frankl (ironically an Adolf), who, with some non-Jewish Slovaks, was arrested on September 28, 1944. Following a stay in the concentration camp in Sered, Slovakia, he was later deported to the extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. Luckily, he was liberated and he survived. After his liberation he depicted his experiences in a collection of paintings and drawings called appropriately “Visions from the inferno”. The plaque reads: “through my works I’ve created a memorial for all nations of the world. No one, regardless of religion, race, or political conviction, should ever again suffer such -or similar- atrocities”. The Frankl family expresses their heartfelt gratitude to all who helped them and others, to survive the Holocaust.

I stopped to think at this outlook, from this place overseeing Bratislava, trying to image the scenes. Many buildings I saw, they keep constructing, keep progressing on the march of civilization… oh how very uncivilized -I thought- we still are as human beings who kill its own kind.