As someone very brave frequently says, it is so, so important to be kind to each other.
When I was waiting in line at Auschwitz, I was confused about the best way to visit the museum, and spoke to the person who was in charge of admission. She was helpful; she seemed tired. But when it was time to scan my ticket, I didn’t have my passport out and ready because I didn’t know, and when she said the words “can I see your ID, please,” the expression on her face looked impatient and frustrated and angry and tired.
When I passed through security, I made a mistake and forgot to take my power bank out of my bag, and the alarm went off, and the security officer’s “What are you doing!” was harsh and it stung, especially in that place. I stepped over that threshold and I think I made it a few steps before starting to cry, and it was kind of crying where breathing feels like kicking yourself to the surface for a lungful of air before being pushed back under the surface again.
That night, after dark, when the camps had closed, I was in the town of Oświęcem, the Polish name of the town that Germany dubbed Auschwitz. I didn’t have a bus ticket back to my hostel and I felt so stupid. I asked the woman behind the desk at a souvenir shop for directions to a train station. When I got there, the place was under heavy construction and I couldn’t find the platform or anywhere to buy a ticket. An English couple asked me for directions to the train to Kraków, but I was as lost as they were. So we banded together to look for the train, and found it within about thirty seconds of meeting.
Sometimes in Germany it is possible to travel long distances on public transportation without one’s ticket being checked. This is illegal, but since I knew that train was leaving soon and didn’t know if there was another one coming, I got on the train without a ticket and sort of prayed. This was a mistake.
About halfway to Kraków a woman in black came down the aisle checking tickets. When she came to me, I told her that I didn’t have one. I didn’t know what was going to happen and I was scared. She didn’t speak my language, but she understood what had happened.
She kept her face carefully blank, wrote something down on her device, and then pulled out a credit card machine. 9zł, she told me. I paid. She scolded me in Polish, and then smiled and walked away.
When I got the the train station, I went looking for a restroom. I was so tired. In Europe it’s not uncommon for bathrooms in public places to require and entrance fee, and I didn’t have the right change. A woman who was walking out saw me standing on the wrong side of the gate, reached into her bag, and put the coin in the slot and walked away without a word.
In the cramped, temporary space of my hostel dorm room, one of my roommates snores very loudly and it makes it hard for me to sleep. He, in turn, complained that the boots I have been walking around Europe in for a month and a half smell really, really bad.
Initially, he thought I was hiding some kind of rotting cheese in my locker. And I – yeah. He also assumed I was lying when I was too embarrassed to tell him about my shoes.
The Cheese Guy felt awkward about talking to me alone, because “you know, young people, women” so he asked an Italian guy who was also sharing the space with us for help confronting me about it.
Because of the brokenness of his English and my German, he still didn’t believe me about the cheese even after I broke down and tried to communicate about the shoes and left them outside on the balcony for the night.
The Italian guy immediately understood, and was like “OH, that makes sense, it happens to me too, here, would you like to borrow this stuff I have, it helps…”
When the Cheese Guy finally understood, he was so embarrassed that he could not look me in the eye.
… I gave the Italian guy permission to tell his girlfriend this story because we both agreed that it’ll be funny in retrospect.
I think for a second there I kind of hated the Cheese Guy. Especially at 5AM when his snoring woke me up from a bad dream, and wouldn’t let me go back to sleep.
But it’s too much work.
In the unexpected, awkward, frustrating intimacy of that space, we had to live with each other’s human-ness and faults. Almost like Anne in the Secret Annex, except nothing like that, because both of us had the freedom to leave.
There is a voice in my head that tells me that I don’t have any of my shit together and I am somehow failing at life because of all of the mistakes I made that day. It’s often very loud.
There is another voice in my head – one that usually sounds like my Dad – that says something like “oh, look, another imperfect human. Never seen one of Those before.”
Everyone is doing their best all the time. I made so many mistakes that day, and every day. I’m human. I’m messy and soo flawed. And so is everyone else.
In a world that is capable of containing so much human cruelty and horror and coldness, it is so important to have empathy for other people.
Try to stand in their shoes. Please.