A Step-by-Step Guide to Growing Daffodils and Narcissi

Experts' opinions are different, some advise to water once a year, others recommend not to overdo it with frequency if we want to enjoy the vibrant colour longer.

Four hundred and fifty thousand paper flowers. Yellow, distributed on April 19 in Warsaw and several other cities in Poland is an unpragmatic but beautiful action. A very, very special, unfortunately painful aspect of what "beautiful action" is, an action that does not really matter with the realities is recalled on the day of the outbreak of the Ghetto Uprising. In a piece of the city where about thousands of people crowded and died. It was the first uprising in the city during World War II. 

What happens to a city where desperation and rage are being voiced? 

It is impossible to study this as part of some research disciplines: urban planning, public space studies, history, sociology, anthropology, etc. 

The flowers are good, especially so ordinary and anonymous. We won't know who started such a gesture. We don't have to know that, we should remember. We should, because of beauty, for example. It's supposedly a damn expensive abstraction, but anyone can have it, at least once. 

Maybe it's time to deal with something similarly simple, e.g. letters, apart from flowers. 

Jews, Poles, Germans, after a while it will turn out that you have to add Russians, Belarusians, Lithuanians (Balts), Ukrainians and, as usual, after a long time, we will remember about Roma and Tatars. All these people found themselves next to each other, facing each other for reasons that many of them did not want and did not understand. Many on the contrary. So much history is enough if we are to live in the same place, inhabited for centuries by – as Hannah Arendt wrote – “mixed population belt”. Several European ethnos, several alphabets, a history of misunderstanding. Who among us can write anything, even Beauty In Hebrew, Yiddish, Polish, German, Russian, Ukrainian, Belarusian, Lithuanian and Roma and Tatar? No one? Let's try something more obvious: memory? No one either? We have a lot of work ahead of us. You have to communicate somehow, now in 2023. Even at the primary school level, typographically, simply.

The story of "our" tendency to uprisings, to seek freedom together with the older tradition of Jewish uprisings, would do well for Polish historical memory. Uprisings caused without great chances of victory. It will then be easier to determine whether Warsaw's Little Insurgent Monument is a stunningly beautiful or stunningly terrible monument. 

And what to do to make it the last such monument on Earth.

Illustration: Silver tetradrachma from about 133 AD, from the time of the establishment of Bar-Kochba.