De Moscu a Polonia

The path I followed after leaving Moscow has been a path of history, more than a leisure trip, it has been cold water thrown at my face about the reality and the truth of some historical events.
Going to the political museum in St Petersburg, the Occupation museum in Riga, the KGB museum in Vilnius, the Refugee’s museum in Kaunas, and meeting the road museum that is the people walking the street...
People tell you history as they lived it. Seeing the distance growing bigger and bigger between Latvians and Russian Latvia residents breaks me. Such a small place with two faces totally opposite from one another. It seems to me like nothing more than a time bomb.
Destruction, genocide, murder... just pure hate. Coming into this trip and despite my cynicism, I didn’t believe, or didn’t want to believe, that actual evil could exist. Pure and unaltered evil, not just times when somebody does something bad, but true, consistent, planned evil. I´ve come to realize it does exist.
And these people have lived it. Walking through the streets you can see the uneasiness, uneasiness of a society who has been free for less than 20 years, uneasiness of a society that has their freedom taken away more than enough times, uneasiness of the possibility of it happening again as this world moves “forward.”
Tomorrow, the last piece of this trip through history, Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. Not a happy spot but one I believe is necessary in everybody’s life to understand the past…