Capital Roaming

Even though I haven’t had a full semester of classes since last fall, I have yet to lose my cheap college student, trying-to-save-money-now-to-pay-off-school-loans-later attitude. Every morning, I take a commuter train into Washington, D.C. from Baltimore and then take the metro to my office at the U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum. Despite record-high temperatures recently in our nation’s capital, I frequently opt to walk from Union Station to avoid paying the metro fare.

While walking to work, I cannot help but be reminded of my previous morning commutes. One wouldn’t presume that D.C. and Oswiecim are even remotely similar, but I begin to miss my Polish life, particularly when I walk to USHMM. Upon entering the respective workspaces, differences are apparent, as a site of mass murder bares authenticities not possible for a memorial to sites of mass murder. When walking around the community, however, I still manage to pass stands selling Polish sausages and various cafes and bakeries. I hold my own opinions of which country houses a greater population of quality bakers, biased greatly by prices, but the déjà vu moments are frequent and welcome.

I think about my time in Poland daily. These moments lack great significance and mostly revolve around a general longing for my calm life, amazing friends and abundance of cheap, fresh food. Although no time-stopping epiphanies occur, I drew one conclusion on a recent walk to USHMM: Poland and the U.S. are not all that different. Sure, the culture, customs, language, law, politics, economies, infrastructure and, of course, food, but underneath all of this exists two societies of human beings. And, as a human being, we work for high reputations, value nationalistic pride, and naturally seek deflection over admittance of guilt. For more information, see the 2016 presidential election and recent comments by certain Polish ministry officials.

Near the National Mall exists a memorial to the Japanese internment camps created during World War II. History curriculums, particularly in grade school, frequently omits this dark part of our nation’s history. Of course, other atrocities at larger scales occurred during this time period, but this should not take away from the horrors experienced as a direct result of U.S. governmental actions. The memorial is aesthetically pleasing, particularly with the backdrop of autumn in D.C. However, my overly critical view of atrocity memorialization cannot help but notice the small printed apologies to the Japanese community that easily fade into the background of the large monument.

I could share my uncensored opinions of this corner memorial, but it is more important to see the similarities to criticisms of Polish and German education systems. While visiting various institutions in Germany and Poland as a part of my outside research, I learned of the decline and growth of Holocaust education in schools. As an outsider, it is easy to criticize Poland or Germany for, at some point in history, refusing to educate its youngest generation on respective dark histories. Returning from the “outside” to the United States, I am now able to see how we, as a nation, deflect our own histories in a very similar way, further proving, that Poland and the United States are the same in as many ways as they are different.

History surrounds us at all times. Even if I no longer pass burial ground and crematoriums on my walks to work, World War II and the Holocaust are permanently embedded in my daily life.