MUNICH: I was heading into the crematoriums at Dachau, the German concentration camp, when news of the attack on the United States first reached me.

"There's been an accident at the World Trade Center, a plane crash!" a young German boy cried running toward me. "Both buildings are destroyed."

I stared at him blankly. Clearly, something must have been lost in translation. The World Trade Center? Destroyed? He must have misunderstood. This was America 2001, not Germany 1945.

Five minutes earlier, I'd watched as Dr. Max Mannheimer, a Czech Jew and former Dachau inmate, met an ex-soldier from The US Army's 7th Division, which had helped liberate the camp. The men embraced while Dr. Mannheimer, who lives in Munich and leads tours at Dachau, wept. Goose bumps popped up on my arms, tears burned my eyes, and yet I felt oddly removed from the experience. I've seen so many images of the Holocaust, heard so many stories-not least of all from my own grandparents-that this didn't seem quite real, yet another Spielberg film.

So did my previous day's experience, when I'd explored a nuclear bomb shelter built by the West Germans in the early Seventies. Today, the bunker-replete with hundreds of rows of metal bunk-beds, sealed rooms, an electrical generator and a chilling two-minute recording of air-raid sirens from WWII-is occasionally used as a disco for hip young Berliners, many of whom have only known freedom for 12 years, when the Wall came down. These young people are used to the sight of cranes puncturing their cityscape, they're accustomed to glass and steel structures built to replace medieval buildings bombed to destruction, they know what a fighter jet sounds like. As for me, I thought: This is just what New York needs! A bomb shelter nightclub! What a great gimmick!

And why wouldn't I? To most of us in our twenties and thirties the evils of war are just another marketing tool. Pearl Harbor is a vehicle for Ben Affleck; the Vietnam War landed Tom Cruise an Oscar nomination; Operation Desert Storm felt like a video game courtesy of CNN. Even Patriotism is distilled. On the Fourth of July we grill hamburgers and shoot sparklers into the sky; we tolerate the Star Spangled Banner until the umpire yells, "Play ball!" The only sirens most of us know are those of an ambulance or fire engine-which New Yorkers curse under our breath. We are quick to condemn countries like Israel, for whom security guards and army fatigues are a way of life. To them, camouflage symbolizes survival. To us, it's a fashion statement.

I am often sheepish about my nationality when traveling abroad-- Americans can be so loud, so crass--but now my stomach literally aches with homesickness. I want to be with my people, but like so many travelers I am stranded, trapped in a country not my own, in a language not mine. And so I do what I can: Place bouquets of flowers around a slice of the Berlin Wall left at the American Consulate in Munich; participate in a candlelight vigil with heartbroken Germans and other displaced Americans; cry. During one nighttime event, an older German mans hears my English and gently nudges me toward the American flag, which I drape around myself like a shroud. "I am American," I tell anyone who will listen. "I am a New Yorker."

The rest of the time I sit in my hotel room and watch the footage, the repeated videos of planes slamming into the Twin Towers, the rubble and destruction in the war zone that is lower Manhattan. I see sobbing, pregnant women whose husbands are missing in the action of everyday life, I see grief-stricken parents clutching photographs of children they will most likely never see again. I see the hole in the Manhattan skyline, in the hearts of the world, and I know this is no marketing tool.

That New Yorkers are kind and concerned and generous comes as no surprise to those of us who make our home there, but now the rest of the world is in on our secret. And as I watch my city donating blood and time, applauding rescue workers and fire fighters, as I feel the Germans mourning the loss of people they don't even know, I have to believe--HAVE to--as Anne Frank did, one thing: in spite of everything, people are really good at heart.