Path to inhumanity

Today I remembered the day I went to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau. During the relatively long trip to get there I found myself wondering as to how I would react upon stepping into such an unspeakable place. As I considered myself a human being I expected dread and horror to orchestrate my stream of emotions. Surprisingly, I turned out to be wrong and yet right in an unsettling and unexpected way. Be it because of all the movies, documentaries, books and video games that somehow prepared my mind to it, to the point of making it "familiar" to my eyes; or the noisy crowds of tourists, whose unbearable weight levels everything out to yet another mere touristic attraction; the moment I stepped onto that dead-end railway where thousands if not millions of people met the end of their lives: I felt NOTHING. Nothing?!.. It took me a while to realize that that was the real horror. I didn't feel anything because I got used to it, I had already assimilated and digested the horror and I was fine with it. It became part of my "normality". Only that, at a closer look, such mechanism is exactly what made realities such as concentration camps possible. Apparently slow and perpetual assimilation of bits of inhumanity is the key to dehumanization. Realizing my unanticipated "inhumanity", made me feel a monster on the par with an SS officer. I cried, I swear I cried like a baby that has lost his mom. I cried because I realized that the rules of such wicked game still hold to this day, here and now, in our everyday life. We go on with our miserable lives, driven by false myths of progress and ambitions dressed in gold, without realizing that behind our comforts there are hundreds of "invisible" 21st century "concentration camps". We do know that whenever we buy a cheap dress or an iPhone the price we pay goes beyond the one advertised on the price tag, we know that modern slavery and environmental disasters come with it. Nevertheless, we are so used to it, we consider such realities so far removed that we don't hear, we don't see, we don't want to see... No I wonder, is this what humanity stands for? Am I myself a "human" being? Humanity is not on the stock market, it can't be bought, one has to fight for humanity everyday. In the age of information one cannot hide behind the curtain of ignorance. Because we do know and we can't afford letting the horror wear off with time. Whenever compartments of our conscience go numb we are giving up a bit of our freedom. We can tell to ourselves that we live in a free country until the lie turns into truth, or start exercising that freedom and stand up for what humanity should really stand for!