FROM MY HOTEL ROOM IN AUSCHWITZ

We just arrived in the town of Oświęcim (pronounced Oshvienshim; renamed Auschwitz by the Nazis). We’ll be here for one week. But I’m ready to return home.

It’s as if everything we’ve seen and talked about so far has been leading to this.

I arrived in Poland with a number of misunderstandings. I didn’t expect its towns and cities and buildings to be so beautiful. I didn’t expect to be eating at sushi restaurants while listening to Adele and Justin Timberlake. I didn’t expect to meet people dedicated to rebuilding the Polish Jewish community. The Poland I’m experiencing is modern and vibrant and, at the same time—like every country in the world—struggles with its past.

Last year, when President Obama referred to a “Polish death camp”—rather than a Nazi death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland—his comment enraged Poles and others around the world. The Nazis murdered approximately six million Polish people, around half of them Jews. From 1939, the Nazis kidnapped tens of thousands of Christian Polish children who looked “Aryan” and raised them as Germans. I understand why it’s so offensive to think of these sites of atrocity as Polish sites. The so-called “Hitlerites” are hated here.

After our arrival in Kraków, we visited the Gestapo headquarters and prison where we learned about the Nazi brutality against Polish intellectuals and clergy. We entered the cells that had witnessed obscene violence and murder. Just as we were leaving, an old man arrived—he was a former prisoner of the Nazis, our guide told us. We toured the old city. We talked to survivors of Nazi camps. We met with modern-day Jewish leaders. We explored the areas that were once the Jewish ghettos of Kraków, Warsaw, and Łódź. We stood inside synagogues, some restored, some in ruins. We met with a woman who risked herself to save Jewish lives. We explored sites of Jewish, Roma, and Sinti deportation. We walked into Jewish cemeteries. We met with a man whose grandfather was a high ranking Nazi officer. We stood at the mass grave at Płaszów. And we walked through the killing field at Treblinka. I came to Poland and to these sites of Nazi atrocity for a purpose. To see for myself. To become a better educator. To be a witness of memory.

But I’ve seen enough. I want to go home. I miss my family.

It’s after midnight now. Here in my hotel room. Here in Oświęcim. Peaceful, pretty Oświęcim where I ate pizza for dinner. The Auschwitz camp complex is just a short walk away. We’re scheduled to head over to Auschwitz tomorrow afternoon. The next day, we’ll tour Auschwitz-Birkenau. We’ll see the brick buildings and barbed wire. The barracks. The gas chamber of Auschwitz I. The mounds of shoes and the piles of disintegrating human hair. We’ll be here in Oświęcim for one week.

I’m trying to push away any expectations. I’m trying to swallow my fear. I’m trying to pretend that being here is normal. People live here in Oświęcim. Thousands of tourists and teenagers walk through Auschwitz every summer. I’ve seen Treblinka. How much worse can it get? Every day, I read news reports about ongoing genocide. I walk past people starving on the streets of Chicago, all the time. I watch news clips of mass shootings in American schools. And gang rapes in India. And fire-bombings of Roma homes in Hungary. And petrol burnings of gay men and transgender women in Iraq. Seeing Auschwitz shouldn’t be any different. Human suffering is human suffering. Mass-murder is mass-murder. Right?