# Stay Safe. Virtual Museum Tour (I)

by Laura Lai/Comment

Writing is… a writer is… and there are so many definitions as heads are. I agree with the one saying that writing is a ‘temperamental inclination’. A writer will always look for some moments alone and for a quiet and/or inspiring place (or corner of a place), in order to detach itself from its observations of people and life, and write about it. Some write to create another world – a fantasy world, usually better or perfect. Others write to describe the real world as reflected in an artistic mirror. Others to make a point. To communicate. And so on.

            But this coronavirus times – that many of us witnessed more in artistic movies than in reality – is pushing everybody to keep social distancing, without allowing visits or gatherings. The society responds to the rules imposed by this invisible killing enemy with advices to isolate and keep your routine. What routine to keep for those used to spent time outdoors?! These people live the excitement of discovering a new life! And some may realize now what it means to be a writer. ‘Boring! Outdoors is more beautiful’ – would many of them say. That’s because they only enter the ‘boring environment’ of a writer without writing, but doing other interesting activities. In this ‘boring environment’ the writer detaches itself from the ‘beautiful outdoors’ to create something fascinating. Therefore, a virtual museum tour instead of a proper museum visit is not a big routine change for a writer – it is still indoors. And it stays fascinating.

I have heard that Google Arts & Culture made a list of world museums that I can virtually visit. I wanted to make a great use of these ugly coronovirus times and make the tour of the National Museum of Anthropology (Mexico City) and that of the National Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (South Korea), because I visited lots of museums in Europe, but for these ones I am not sure that I will have the resources to visit too soon, if ever. I ended up visiting the Holocaust Museum & Learning Center from St. Louis (USA), first of all because I am a history-lover, and second, because I am researching for several years already, in order to write a novel whose plot takes place during WWII, but the archives I am interested in were bombed and burned. However, the evil was equally dark and every piece of documentation helps in recreating the setting and the atmosphere of a historical novel, but not necessarily a documentary as the archives were bombed.

Generally speaking, this approx. 1-hour virtual tour is for me the ideal tour, because first, the virtual visitor can make a few clicks and have a general look at what the museum exhibits (please click here). Then, the virtual guest is welcomed by two hosts – one of them being the granddaughter of two survivors giving a more personal dimension to the visit. Finally, each of the two guests take turns in explaining piece by piece what the virtual visitor has seen by itself at the beginning (please click here). Their presentations are structured by themes under the motto: Where one burns books, one will, in the end, burn people. It is more than a motto, rather a demonstrated hypothesis of this virtual tour.

            When I posted on this blog the essay ‘When the Holocaust is not a Rock Star…’ in June 2019 (the article continues here), I was outraged by the results of a public opinion poll showing a high number of people who never heard of this genocide, or who heard of it, but that they do not believe that it truly happened. And my point was that this poll results were as they were because the Holocaust is not a rock star, otherwise most probably everybody would know about it and believe all the mass media gossips, manufactured legends and all fake news as being very real. However, all the genocides people learn about happened in the 20^th century – meaning the century of the photography, the video recording and of that television. The Fuehrer is on the photo, on camera, on TV – he exited, no denial. Many naked bodies, working starved to death are on photo, on camera and on TV – they did not existed. What is that I do not understand?! Is this because some human minds refuse to believe that people can do such a thing to people? And if some of us refuse to believe, it solves the problem? The fact that the human mind may refuse to believe that such manmade atrocities are possible is not even a plausible assumption, because people have been killing animals hunting and people have been going to war against other people for millennia. It is hard to understand… . (to be continued)