Blue

Let me tell you about the color of the European sky.

I noticed it almost immediately the first time I set foot on European soil. Before then I'd never been further north than Michigan, which starts nearly at the same latitude as the Mediterranean Sea. The scatter of sunlight appeared as the deepest blue I had ever had the good fortune to see, and to this day I make a note of it every time I'm in Europe.

It was under the spring version of this sky when I walked through one of the gates of Hell. Birds were celebrating the rebirth of the northern hemisphere with song. Flowers sprung up in every corner and crack in a sidewalk. The day was so clear that there wasn't even a haze over the mountains in the distance.

The beauty of that moment made standing on the site of one of the greatest atrocities humankind has ever known seem like just a plot to a horror movie. But as I walked through Satan's gate past the railroad tracks that carried more than a million human beings to their deaths, as I entered the rooms with the hard wooden bunks that had been the site of tortured sleep, as I looked up at the showerheads that had carried not water but deadly gas, as I kneeled by the ovens that had turned that cerulean sky to ash, I understood the evil that human beings can carry inside them. I cried.

I was 22 years old. The place was Auschwitz.

It wasn't even the first concentration camp I had visited. I had been to Dachau in Munich, where I saw the "work makes you free" slogan for the first time, and to Terezenstadt in Prague, which served as the "model" camp to lie to the world about what these camps really were. It was a place where they used human beings - many of them children - as living propaganda. But seeing Auschwitz was on another level.

And for what? Ethnicity. Race. Religion. Sexuality. Political ideology. Disability. Immigration status. The same categories of human being a candidate for President of the United States has been inciting certain Americans to hate.

The Nazi concentration camp system started out as a mass deportation system. It ended up murdering millions of human beings.

God, I hope America didn't choose this path today. It CAN happen here. It IS happening here. We don't live outside of history.