I visited Auschwitz last year. I do have questions because some things don’t add up but… my grandmother’s brother was shot point blank in the head coming out of a bakery one day after the announcement that war is over… both my grandmothers in their early teens dealt with gestapo, had been relocated to Germany for slave labour… my grandfather was a guarilla soldier in 1944 because he was too young to join the army… I had first hand conversations with 90+ year old veterans of the Warsaw Uprising, at that age you don’t have the need to lie. It was horror every moment of your day to live in german-occupied Poland.

But, when I got to Auschwitz, I didn’t feel much and I didn’t feel all too sorry for the people who went through that hell because I lost that “feeling of deep negative and sorrow amazement” of the evil the people experienced during the german- occupation fourteen days after first day of covid lockdown, when governments appeared on all screens and announced “two more weeks to flatten the curve”. Instead I gained the feeling of horror that my ancestors felt between 1939-1960. Everywhere I went death-wishing angry gestapo mobs kicked me out of stores because I didn’t have a mask on or wanted to buy an ice cream for my son with cash; forbid me from entering restaurants and social gatherings because I didn’t have the right papers to show when stopped and told “papiren bitte”. It was hell. I don’t feel sorry, I’ve been there.