I started writing this blog this morning.

I was writing about the protests that have followed the Olympic torch as it travels country to country from Greece to Beijing for the Olympics on August 8-24.

The protests seemed to be more about people getting in the limelight than doing something about China's track record on human rights. Aren't there more appropriate times to address these issues? I wondered.

That was before I listened to an 80-year-old man who has the number 139755 tattooed on his left arm.

Philip Gans is a Holocaust survivor. He was enslaved in the Nazi concentration labor camp at Auschwitz for a year and a half.

He was 15.

Gans spoke at Gehlen Catholic School on Tuesday about what hate can do to people.

His entire family was killed, most sent to the gas chambers at Auschwitz. He saw Nazis force an old man to take over a heavy job of scooping coal. He saw prisoners beaten to bloody pulp for being too sick to work. He saw humans turn into walking skeletons with hardly anything to eat. He was forced to climb over bodies of the dying and dead to walk miles on a death march.

His story isn't convenient. It isn't feel-good entertainment.

But it needs to be told.

It didn't matter that Gehlen students are putting the final touches on plans for prom this weekend. It didn't matter that they had a geometry test the next hour, or a golf tournament after school.

Stories like Gans' take precedence.

Back to the Olympics.

Maybe raising awareness and starting conversation by protesting China's human rights record along the route of the Olympics torch is exactly what needs to be happening.

It may not be convenient, but talking about treating humans as humans is always appropriate.