The European Football Championship, which is into its second week in Poland and Ukraine, is quite amply showing that there is no sport without politics. But the championship had not even begun yet when the scandalous exchange of infuriated retorts between the leaders of the German national team and the President of the Central Council of Jews in Germany Dieter Graumann took place.

On June 1st, several football players, the coach of the German team, and the leader of the Football Federation went to Auschwitz to commemorate those who perished there during the Holocaust. Two days later, Graumann made a statement that the entire football team, all 23 people should have come to Auschwitz. Would it have been better if all the football players of Germany had come to Auschwitz? And all of their coaches? And their doctors and massage therapists? And how many journalists would have to accompany them? And what for?

A couple of years ago, I saw a group of Israeli teenagers in the Warsaw Nozyk synagogue. They were just regular high school students, loud boys and girls dressed in low-cut jeans. They did not come to the synagogue to pray, but to listen to a lecture about the uprising in the Warsaw ghetto. But, more truthfully, listen they did not, but instead pined for the chance to get away. They pushed each other, chatted, played with their phones – and all of this during the tale of the heroic deeds of warriors under Mordechai Anielewicz. But it was not their behavior which upset me. I had been saddened that an intention to transmit the memory of the ghetto uprising turned into an “educational event.” The Israeli children would probably have a visit to Auschwitz ahead of them.

I was looking at these teenagers and remembering clearly my own Soviet childhood and the grating visits to memorials of revolutionary heroes and war glory. You wanted to just get away from those places – go to the movies, or go play ball. The family dinner on May 9th, during which we remembered our own relatives that did not return from the war, did much more to foster the feeling of memory and participation in history than watching the changing of the guard at the eternal light ever did.

The old Soviet song by Basner and Matusovsky “Where does your Homeland begin” has an amazingly truthful psychological detail: “From our father's old budenovka (broadcloth helmet) that we found somewhere in the closet.” One can have a personal relationship with history – or none at all.

Three years ago, the famous Polish photographer Mikolaj Grynberg started coming to Auschwitz, living there several days a month. This was not an art project, but an attempt to deal with a personal crisis: the photographer's mother, who had survived Auschwitz, had died. Grynberg thought of family history, came to the former concentration camp, and spent the night in the buildings where the administration of the camp had lived during the war. After some time had passed, he began talking with the visitors of the memorial. People from all over the world wind up in Auschwitz for very different reasons. Sometimes they do not know where they are going. Sometimes they are not prepared for the sheer magnitude of what they are about to see. Sometimes a tour is the cheapest way to get to Europe from America.

When talking with French tourists, Grynberg told them that his grandmother and mother were deported to a concentration camp from Paris, after being arrested by French policemen. The French were amazed: “You must be mistaken. That's impossible. Only Germans arrested Jews.” Later, Grynberg shortened his talks with the visitors to just one question: “What are you doing here?” The answers to these questions and Grynberg's photos – vague, black and white faces and figures and clear colored photos of barracks and crematoriums – all became part of a book that Grynberg titled: “Auschwitz: What Am I Doing Here?”

This is the only question worth asking.
What am I doing when going to a place of memory?
What do I want to see there?
What do I want to find within myself?

It would be interesting to talk with the German football players and the Israeli high schoolers about what they really felt. It would have been doubly interesting to learn of what, for each of them, is their source of historic memory, and what they are ready to empathize with. The key here is “readiness.”

It is impossible to speak of grief to someone who wants to know nothing of it. And it is unlikely that this emotional readiness will somehow appear in German football players or Israeli teenagers who, following a strange non-religious ritual, are being taken to Auschwitz in a nice organized manner. An official visit to a former memorial is an offense to the very nature of memory. The feeling of memory and the feeling of participation is impossible to instill. It can only be developed in oneself, after finding connections between yourself and the past, which may have been invisible earlier.

Author about himself: I was born in 1967 in Siberia, and moved to Moscow, one of the places my family hails from, twelve years ago. My longest and most prolific vocation is journalism: I was the editor of the cultural section in the Russian Reporter, moderated the XX Century Blog on the Snob website, and was a columnist in Buknik. Right now, my main work involves creating documentary and interactive theater projects. This is a natural extension of my journalistic work, since the most interesting things are not made up, but had really happened. Not fiction, but history that has been preserved in a document or that is happening at this very moment.

Mikhail Kaluzhsky