In North America, the Holocaust Auschwitz has been taken up as a symbol. And although at one level understanding of this event eludes human comprehension, North Americans claim to understand, and above all, to remember. Memorials, such as the one in Washington, DC, while important, are imbued with a certain self-righteousness. He was sent away with little more than a pat on the back. In North America, history is studied more thematically rather than chronologically.
Less emphasis is placed on dates.
But both for students living in Poland and those living in North America today, the topic of the Holocauset remains distant. North Americans learn only of the camp at Auschwitz. There would be no reason to focus on learning of the town at O wi cim otherwise. If North American students learn nothing else from high school history, they remember that Auschwitz is synonymous with death, evil and despair. For those of us who take high school learning any further, from our comfortable position on the western side of the Atlantic, we learn further tales of the death and destruction that took place on a mass scale in Auschwitz.