La cicuta de los justos

 Dedicated to Álvaro, Mario, Antonio, Jorge, David, Sebas and Pedro and their impeccable attitude.

I do encourage you to visit Krakow, a beautiful city that has also hosted, from August 2 to 4, an international tournament of a hardly known game: Flames of War. World War II expands in all its splendor on the gaming tables with players from various parts of the world. A military strategy game that manages to assemble a Tower of Babel in the same space, with a single objective: just play. They display varied and artisanal settings, the Russians and Germans with their infantry, tanks, planes and other war devices position themselves, with the use of a dice, around their objectives.

You will be amazed, but they came from Switzerland, Ireland, the United States, Austria, Belarus, Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Greece, Iceland, Italy, Holland, New Zealand, Northern Ireland, Portugal, and Spain. The host this year was Poland. The same country who lived part of this history and saw torture and death, hosts this event. Some of my readers will say that it is an international meeting to play with toy soldiers and tanks, but that non-existent UN seemed to be deployed there, in a pavillion full of geeks recreating World War II and absolutely all of them surviving. At the end of each battle celebrating with beer, laughter, bashing their tactics in English, congratulating themselves on the good strategies of their non-bloody battles. The end of each battle was celebrated by sharing the gifts they had brought for their rivals: stylishly labelled beer, chocolates, smoke markers, bartering of t-shirts... Are they really geeks?

I was there and I saw them all leave unscathed, prepared for next summer's event, in any other country, because the world belongs to no one. 

I have searched for this international and friendly meeting in the press and no one knows that a small part of peace in the world was negotiated there. Only a few privileged people have seen it, smiling, because we have believed that something greater is possible.

(La traducción se la agradezco a mi querida amiga Montaña.)