Visiting Auschwitz I: my experience at the memorial and museum

I believe that nobody goes to Auschwitz-Birkenau by accident today. You come here carrying a story: your own, your family's, your people's, the one you encountered in books or learned about at school. Walking beneath the "Arbeit macht frei" gate, setting foot in a concentration camp and extermination camp, "visiting the Auschwitz museum," as some people put it... has nothing to do with an ordinary visit.

Auschwitz is almost impossible to put into words. For more than a million people, it was the end. Horror, inhumanity, isolation. In this account, I want to tell you about the place, its history, and what it feels like to be there.

But Auschwitz can also mark the beginning of something else: the moment when you, too, become a witness to memory, someone who has seen and can speak about it. And I would like to guide those who feel ready for that journey.

It would be impossible to tell Auschwitz in a single article, and limiting to try. So here is what I suggest:

• In this article, I am taking you to Auschwitz I, the main camp, where the brick blocks and museum exhibitions are located today.
• I wrote a second account about Birkenau, a very different place, shaped by its vastness, emptiness, and destruction.
• And if you are planning your visit, you will find all the practical details in my complete guide.

I also hope this article can open the door to conversation about this very particular place, preserved by people doing remarkable work. Not every memorial site was "fortunate" enough to survive, as I saw when I visited the site of the former Plaszow camp, which the Nazis almost completely erased. So Auschwitz is not only evidence of barbarity. It is also a singular place of remembrance, where tribute can still be paid to those who never came back.

Before taking you inside Auschwitz I, it is worth briefly explaining what this camp system actually was.

Understanding Auschwitz before entering the camp

Auschwitz-Birkenau was unique in that it served a double function during World War II: it was both a concentration camp and an extermination camp. Understanding that distinction helps make sense of what you see there. So what is the difference?

• Concentration camps, which existed across Europe, were established by the Nazis in Germany as soon as Adolf Hitler came to power. In German, they were called "KZ" (Konzentrationslager), and you will sometimes see Auschwitz referred to as "KZ Auschwitz." Their purpose was to imprison people the Nazi regime considered undesirable, for many different reasons, whether political, religious, or otherwise. Officially, they were presented as labor camps. In reality, death rates were catastrophic because of violence, starvation, and forced labor.
• Extermination camps had one purpose only: the mass murder of human beings, especially Jews. Historians generally identify six of them, all in occupied Poland: Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor, and Treblinka.

Before I go any further into my visit, this map helps place Auschwitz within the wider Nazi camp system across Europe:

The Auschwitz camp complex operated longer than any other and claimed the highest number of victims. Between its opening in September 1941 and its liquidation in January 1945, more than 1.1 million people were murdered there.

The Auschwitz complex was divided into three main parts:

• Auschwitz I, the main camp. This is where you now find the "Arbeit macht frei" gate, the brick blocks, and most of the museum exhibitions. This article is devoted to that part of the site.
• Auschwitz II - Birkenau, the vast concentration and extermination camp, marked by the railway tracks, barracks, and the ruins of the crematoria. I wrote a separate account about Birkenau because the experience there is so different.
• Auschwitz III - Monowitz and the satellite camps, of which very little remains today.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum therefore includes Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II. And although we call it a museum, the exhibitions are installed in the very places where deportees suffered and died.

Why I chose to go to Auschwitz

The idea of going to Auschwitz did not come out of nowhere. It was the result of a long personal path that began in childhood, when I first immersed myself in books describing the horror. The Diary of Anne Frank, A Bag of Marbles by Joseph Joffo, Death Is My Trade by Robert Merle, and many other testimonies and novels about that period... I kept reading about it, extensively. About 90% of my bookshelves are devoted to the Holocaust and World War II.

And yet I never truly imagined I would one day go to Auschwitz-Birkenau in person. Perhaps because part of me would have preferred this place to exist only in books. Perhaps because you have to wait for the right moment.

The right moment is a personal decision

The right moment is not when you can visit Auschwitz without emotion. It is when you can go without being completely overwhelmed by it. Auschwitz confronts you with what is most unspeakable in human beings. It throws horror, pain, shame, guilt, cruelty, and so many other feelings in your face that you are, inevitably, shaken.

You know you are ready to go when you feel capable of reaching the bottom and still pushing back up. When the death that hangs over everything there somehow gives you a stronger sense of life. Makes you more aware of your own luck. Of what it truly means to be alive. Of the role each of us can play in preserving memory. Of how necessary it is to put everyday worries back into perspective. That is when you are ready to face a place like Auschwitz.

Why I chose to visit Auschwitz without a guide

From the moment I decided to go, I knew I wanted to visit Auschwitz without a guide. I did not want a rushed experience. I wanted to be able to step away from tourists taking selfies beneath the Arbeit macht frei gate.

I did not want someone else dictating my time for reflection with "you have 5 minutes here." Or being told to spend 15 minutes in one room and 3 in another when I wanted to do the exact opposite.

It is a choice I never regretted for a second. I was able to enter blocks that guided tours do not usually include. I could wait for groups to move on and steal moments of silence. I could take photos without getting in anyone's way. I could fill the small notebook that travels everywhere with me with hurried, angry notes.

At the bookstore, I bought the "Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial" guidebook, and I highly recommend it (it cost less than €6, roughly $7 / £5). It includes maps and very useful historical explanations that make it much easier to find your bearings if you are visiting without a guide. The idea was not to read it cover to cover during the visit, of course, but it proved invaluable, especially at Birkenau.

I will also share a map of Auschwitz I, which may help you visualize the layout of the camp I am about to describe. Today, visitors enter near building G on the map.

I chose October for a specific reason. Seventy-three years earlier, on October 7, 1944, an extraordinary uprising took place at Birkenau: members of the Sonderkommando, deportees forced to remove bodies from the gas chambers and carry them to the crematoria, revolted, blowing up Crematorium IV and damaging Crematorium III. Resistance, to the very end, at a moment when the Nazis had already begun destroying the facilities to conceal their crimes.

Thinking of them, I woke up that morning at 5:15 a.m., not without apprehension. I caught the bus in Krakow in the cold. I watched the bleak landscape slide by on the way to Oswiecim, this small town that had never asked for any of this.

The cruel irony is that Germans and Poles had lived together peacefully in Oswiecim for a long time. And it was the Kings of Poland who had encouraged Jews to settle in this rather neglected region, to the point that on the eve of World War II, 58% of Oswiecim's population was Jewish.

And then the camps came.

Entering Auschwitz I

The bus drops me off at the entrance to Auschwitz I. This was the original camp, built in spring 1940 on the site of former Polish army barracks. Around 70,000 people died here. Many prisoners of war, political opponents, and members of the resistance were sent to this camp.

Outside the concentration camp, information boards explain a great deal about the site. Over the past decade or so, visitor numbers at the Auschwitz museum have risen dramatically. From around 500,000 visitors in 2003, the site now welcomes more than 2 million people a year. Perhaps because enough time has passed for younger generations to approach it differently, with less of the guilt and shame that once weighed so heavily. Perhaps because the internet has made it easier to find information and organize a visit.

Because I chose to visit Auschwitz without a guide, I can enter through a dedicated line rather than queueing with the tour groups.

The first thing that strikes me is that the camp feels small. You can already see where it ends. And that is disturbing in itself when you know that as many as 20,000 prisoners were held here at the same time.

Bright sunshine falls over the camp and, if you did not know where you were, it could almost feel like an ordinary day.

"Arbeit macht frei"

Very quickly, you find yourself standing before the gate engraved in collective memory: Arbeit macht frei. The phrase means "work sets you free." It had already appeared in various books and was displayed on the facade of the chemical company IG Farben. This company was one of Nazism's major financial backers and manufactured Zyklon B, the poison gas used in the gas chambers.

Then you walk through the gate... and that moment affected me even more than seeing the words themselves. You cross that threshold knowing that you are free to walk back out again.

Inside the camp, several blocks can be visited. Some contain general exhibitions about life in the camp and the crimes committed there, including medical experiments and torture. Others are more specialized and focus on particular groups, such as Poles, French people, Belgians, Sinti, or Roma, or on specific aspects of Nazism, such as the collaboration of major companies with the Nazi regime. These more specialized blocks are often not included on standard guided tours.

Each block contains explanations, objects, photographs, and in some cases information panels outside as well. You are confronted with an overwhelming amount of material, far more than anyone could properly absorb in a single day.

As you enter the camp, on the right you see the place where the Auschwitz I orchestra played from 1941 onward. It performed while prisoners marched to and from work, both to keep them in step and to make counting easier for the SS. Being part of the orchestra saved some prisoners' lives. Birkenau also had a women's orchestra.

On the left stands Block 24, which is not open to visitors. From 1943 to 1945, it housed a brothel. Yes, a place of prostitution in the middle of a concentration camp. The women forced into prostitution were selected from among young deportees, mostly Polish and German. The clients were either SS men or a small number of non-Jewish prisoners who held "important" roles in the camp hierarchy. Even today, prostitution in concentration camps remains a little-known and deeply taboo subject.

Inside the museum blocks: what you discover at Auschwitz I

Stepping inside the blocks at Auschwitz I means moving from an outdoor space already heavy with meaning into something more enclosed, more intimate, and often more difficult. Each building tells a different part of the story: the victims, the perpetrators, the machinery of the system, and the traces left behind.

You move forward without really knowing where to begin. You stop, you read, you look... and very quickly, you realize that it will be impossible to see everything in a single day.

Block 14: Poles facing the enemy

I began with Block 14. It deals with Poland's role in the Resistance and the fate reserved for the Polish population.

I spent an enormous amount of time in this block because I could not bring myself to skim over certain documents or certain faces. As if truly looking at each victim were a form of respect. But there are so many exhibits at the Auschwitz museum that it is simply impossible to hope to take everything in during one visit.

I realized this when I checked my watch at 11 a.m. and saw that I had visited only two blocks, even though I had been in the camp since early morning.

What I remember from Block 14 are images: starving children, terrifyingly thin, evidence of the Nazi strategy to weaken the Polish people in order to force them into submission.

I also remember a quote from Himmler:

"For the non-German population of the East, there must be no schooling beyond [elementary school]. The aim of such a school can only be the following: to count up to 500 at most, to write one's name, to learn that God has ordered them to serve the Germans, to show honest diligence and politeness. I do not think that reading is necessary."

The entire education system had been reshaped accordingly.

Everywhere there are faces and stories of prisoners. Like this little girl, Ania Bogdanska, born in Birkenau in October 1944. I later looked up what became of her. Her mother was left sterile as a result of her imprisonment in Auschwitz, but both she and her daughter survived.

From there, you can continue to Block 15, which covers the invasion of Poland, the division of its territory between Germany and the Soviet Union, and everything that followed, including the deportations.

Block 13: the fate of minorities

Block 13 focuses on the fate of Roma and Sinti minorities. Here again, many of the photographs date from before the war. They are especially striking because you know that the happiness they capture is about to be destroyed. As you move through Block 13, children playing in the summer grass gradually give way to images of naked, emaciated children, victims of typhus and starvation.

Some of them were filmed by Nazi "racial biologists," people who tried to catalogue the supposed "defects" of these minorities in order to justify their extermination. Of the children shown in that film, only four survived.

Everywhere, numbers, names, faces... and so many people who never returned home.

Block 4: extermination

Sooner or later, you arrive there. Block 4 marks a shift in atmosphere. After the calm and relative quiet of Blocks 14 and 13, you enter one of the places that "everyone wants to see at Auschwitz." There are groups. People push past one another to take photos. But there is also a woman in tears, visiting with an Israeli flag draped over her shoulders.

Auschwitz also means facing this reality: when confronted with the unbearable, everyone copes differently.

When I have spoken with other visitors afterwards, I noticed that the behaviors they found shocking were not always the same. Some were disturbed by flags, saying "this is not a stadium." Others were upset by people taking photographs. Personally, what unsettled me most was hearing people laugh loudly at Birkenau.

In the end, though, I think everyone grieves in their own way and does what they can to create some form of emotional distance from the place. Nervous laughter, photography, note-taking, wearing visible symbols of belonging to the Jewish community: all of these can be deeply personal ways of coping with the weight of it.

In Block 4, I took no photos.

In the first two rooms, you see document after document, the kind one would want to throw in the face of Holocaust deniers: telegrams, records of arrests and deportations, with reasons that grow more absurd and degrading by the line: helping Jews, listening to foreign radio, reading prohibited material. There is also an urn containing ashes collected at Birkenau near the crematoria.

You see prisoner files, the document announcing the "Final Solution," a copy of the camp death register, photographs of ghettos across Europe. The ledgers seem endless.

The third room deals with transport to Auschwitz and arrival at the camp, with the selections. One photograph shows a group of children in Birkenau in 1944, walking toward death without knowing it. I always think of Elie Wiesel's words:

"Hunger, thirst, fear, transport, selection, fire and chimney: these words mean certain things, but at that time, they meant something else."

In my notebook, I wrote a single word: "Atrocious." The stairs leading upstairs in Block 4 are worn down by footsteps. The crowd presses on. It is hard to call it eagerness to see Room 4. This is the room devoted to extermination.

There are photographs secretly taken by the Sonderkommando men I mentioned earlier. There are technical calculations for crematorium capacity, ventilation systems, operating costs. It is cold, mathematical, hateful.

You read how the gas chambers functioned, how the "fake showers" were designed to make people believe they were simply going to wash. They crammed 2,000 people into 210 m², about 2,260 sq ft. Almost 10 people per square meter. Try to imagine that in an apartment. In a house.

And that is not all. You learn about Zyklon B, the poison gas that suffocated people. The removal of gold teeth, jewelry, hair. The transfer of the bodies to the crematoria.

Room 5 shows what became of those human beings. Textiles made from the hair of murdered women. Skeletons "prepared" to be sent to the anatomy institute in Strasbourg, where they were used to train medical students. 1,950 kilograms of hair (about 4,300 pounds) piled in a single room. 4,300 pounds. Human hair weighs less than 200 grams (about 7 ounces) per person. That hair was sold to the German textile industry for 50 pfennigs per kilogram.

"No words," I wrote in my notebook. What can you say in front of that? How do human beings get there?

Room 6 of Block 4 deals with the plundering of Jewish property, with records meticulously listing everything that was stolen. The quantities are staggering: 111,000 pairs of shoes. 132,000 shirts. 119,000 dresses.

Block 5: evidence of the crimes

Block 5 is like a tomb for all the belongings found after the liberation of the camps, objects that had once belonged to the deportees. Prayer shawls, photographs, and thousands upon thousands of ordinary items: combs, brushes, shaving brushes, shoe polish, clothes, dishes. Prosthetic limbs that belonged to disabled deportees.

And then suddenly you are walking past thousands of shoes from men, women, and children. Most are blackened with age, but here and there a few red shoes stand out. I could not help thinking of the little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List.

Block 6: prisoners' daily life

Here, the museum explains how deportees were processed on arrival, assigned a patch indicating the reason for their imprisonment, tattooed in some cases so that bodies could later be identified in a camp where the death rate was soaring. You walk down a corridor lined with photographs, men on one side, women on the other, most of them young. Some look defeated. Others still seem proud, defiant. Many of these faces did not survive.

You also learn about daily life in the camp, and the punishments inflicted when prisoners tried small tricks to stay warm, such as wrapping towels around their feet. Deportees received around 1,500 calories a day, less than what is generally recommended for a child, while working 11 hours a day, six days a week, sometimes seven. To survive, finding some way to get extra food was essential.

Photographs taken after the liberation of the camp show the devastating effects of malnutrition. Several thousand prisoners were too weak to be evacuated because they could no longer walk. Some died even after liberation, their bodies too damaged to recover.

In these images, for example, you see a little girl whose twin sister died after liberation, too weak to survive. A 31-year-old woman who weighed 65 kg at 1.60 m (about 143 lb at 5 ft 3 in), before the war, and just 25 kg (55 lb), when she left Auschwitz. Another woman, 37 years old, who weighed 60 kg at 1.68 m (about 132 lb at 5 ft 6 in), before Auschwitz and 35 kg (77 lb) when she came out.

The museum also explains prisoners' daily routines. Fecal bacteria found in the food. Rotten meat served to them. Mengele's experiments on twins. "Histological analysis of the head of a 12-year-old child." At that point, the dictionary no longer contains words strong enough for what happened here.

Block 7: living conditions and hygiene

Or rather, conditions for survival and the near-total absence of hygiene. Imagine 700 to 1,000 prisoners in a single barrack. Block 7 shows what those detention conditions looked like. At first, there was only straw spread on the floor, then crude straw mattresses until 1941.

Later, some minimal fittings were added, along with communal toilets that offered no privacy at all. Individual bunks existed, but several people had to share them. In the lower bunks, there were often two prisoners on each level.

Some prisoners, selected from among the deportees, held supervisory positions inside the camp and were at times even more brutal than the SS themselves. Kapos supervised the work. Blockälteste supervised the blocks. Only they had anything resembling a "room," with a little more privacy than the dormitories. Some used their position to help other prisoners as much as they could.

Washbasins were installed in 1941. Before that, prisoners had to make do with containers placed outside the barracks.

There were far too few toilets for the number of prisoners in the camp. Before toilets were installed in 1941, deportees had to use outdoor latrines.

Blocks 10 and 11: the death block and medical experiments

Block 10, which is not open to visitors, was used in particular for sterilization experiments carried out on deportees between April 1943 and May 1944. It stands next to Block 11, known as the "death block." Block 11 functioned as a prison within the prison. Deportees suspected of clandestine activities, such as preparing an escape or a mutiny, were sent there. So were local Poles accused of helping prisoners.

The Gestapo held brief sham trials there, which generally ended in a death sentence. The sentence was often carried out by the SS guard assigned to the block at the time. Prisoners were forced to work there as well. They, too, had a "room" to sleep in.

Men and women condemned to death had to undress in a specific room beforehand.

The condemned were then led into a courtyard between Blocks 10 and 11, where they were usually shot by firing squad against the "Wall of Death". Today, visitors place candles and flowers there in tribute to the victims.

On the left side of the photo above, you can see a slanted post with a hook at the top. This was a torture post. Prisoners were suspended there by their arms, with their hands tied behind their backs, and left that way for hours, sometimes days.

Block 11 is all of that. A kind of inventive cruelty designed to inflict suffering as completely as possible. Physical torture, mental torture, total torture, the destruction of the human being.

You can go down into the basement of Block 11. This is where prisoners accused of breaking camp rules were tortured. I found myself alone there, because it was already after 1 p.m. The morning groups had left, and the afternoon groups had not yet arrived. That only made it more oppressive.

The basement was a place of suffering that often ended in death.

There were "dark cells", with no windows, no ventilation, black-painted walls, where prisoners were locked without food or water until the oxygen ran out and they suffocated.

There were also standing cells. People were literally walled in there, four at a time, with room only to stand upright. A tiny opening about 5 cm wide let in just enough air to breathe. Those who did not die of exhaustion were sent back to work the next day.

It was also in this basement that Zyklon B, the poison gas later used in the gas chambers, was tested for the first time.

The blocks devoted to individual nations

The visit is far from over and, as you can see, each block adds another layer of horror. After Block 11, I had to speed up a little because I still wanted to continue on to Birkenau and no longer had enough time to study everything in detail. I still made sure to step inside every block and walk through it, even if I could not stop everywhere for long.

I first entered a building on the edge of the camp, much of it devoted to the role of major industrial companies in the war and in the Nazi regime. It focuses in particular on the part played by Topf und Söhne in building the crematoria.

Germany's first crematorium dated back to 1878. There were only around twenty of them in 1914, and it was not until 1934 that cremation started to be seen as a genuine alternative to burial. Topf und Söhne manufactured heating systems and incinerators, and at the time described its work with the Nazis as an "industrial challenge."

"Ingrained collaborators," I wrote in my notebook. Topf und Söhne always denied responsibility afterwards and was never convicted for complicity.

If we know so much today about the crematoria, it is thanks in part to the Sonderkommando men who managed to photograph them, and to the testimonies of prisoners who later spoke out, because the Nazis did everything they could to erase the evidence of their crimes, blowing up the crematoria once they understood the tide was turning.

There are many other blocks to visit as well:

• Block 27, which contains a "Book of Names" listing more than 4 million Holocaust victims.
• Block 21, devoted to the Jewish community of the Netherlands.
• Block 18, devoted to Hungarian Jews and other deported Hungarian minorities.
• Block 17, devoted to Austria, though it was closed for restoration during my visit.
• Block 16, devoted to Bohemia.

Block 20 is dedicated to deportees from France on the ground floor and from Belgium upstairs. The visit begins in a long, dimly lit corridor with small lights along the floor. At the end, a screen displays the following words in French:

"Remember. Nearly 76,000 Jews were deported from France, including more than 11,000 children. Nearly 69,000 of them were deported to Auschwitz, nearly 900 to Kaunas, more than 2,000 to Majdanek, more than 2,000 to Sobibor. Of all these deportees, only 2,500 came back, about 3% of them.
More than 3,000 resistance members were deported to Auschwitz. Of these, only 969 came back."

The staging is deeply moving. Photographs line the walls, along with painted silhouettes that make it feel as though the shadows of these victims are still walking beside you.

There are memories of an earlier, happier time. A room listing the convoys that departed France for the death camps. Explanations about the Vichy regime. The exhibition is accompanied by sound, and you hear the noise of trains as you move through the rooms. It is striking.

Upstairs, the atmosphere changes completely. It is brighter, very different in tone, and tells the story of the Holocaust in Belgium.

The medical blocks

What are now Blocks 20 and 21 once formed part of what the camp called the "Revier", the prisoners' infirmary. The number of sick prisoners increased so dramatically over time that Block 28 was added at the end of 1940, followed later by Blocks 9 and 19.

The role of these blocks changed over time. In 1941, for example, Block 20 housed contagious patients and those whom camp slang referred to as "Müselmänner," a term used for dying prisoners who had effectively given up and lay there waiting for the end. It was in Block 20 that some prisoners were killed by lethal injection. On certain days, several dozen people were murdered in this way.

Block 21 later became a surgical block.

You can still see traces of this medical past at the entrances to these buildings, with inscriptions such as "Haftl.-Krankenbau," short for Häftlings-Krankenbau, meaning "prisoners' infirmary."

The other blocks

If you look back over the list of blocks I have mentioned, you will notice that some are not open to visitors. They usually house offices, such as the Auschwitz museum administration, deportee archives in Block 24, or restoration workshops for objects. Others are reserved for school groups, such as Blocks 2 and 3, which have been preserved in their original state.

Some blocks may also be temporarily closed for restoration work. This is usually announced in advance on the Auschwitz museum website.

Outside the camp: barbed wire, roll call, and crematorium

After the blocks, you have to step back outside. Leave behind the rooms, the display cases, the documents, and return to the open air. But at Auschwitz I, nothing really feels lighter outdoors. Your gaze shifts elsewhere, but the weight of the place remains.

The roll call square

Beyond the blocks, the outdoor spaces of the camp are striking in their own right. The double rows of barbed wire, with daylight filtering through them. The outside world, which must have felt both so close and impossibly far away. The "danger of death" signs, with all their bleak absurdity. The gallows where Rudolf Höss, the camp's main commandant, was hanged after the war, right in the middle of the kingdom of horror he had ruled.

The roll call square left a deep impression on me. This is where deportees had to assemble for roll call, a scene described again and again in survivor testimonies and often shown in films. The SS deliberately dragged these roll calls out for hours, sometimes for as long as 12 hours, regardless of the weather.

On this square, you can still see the gallows. Prisoners were regularly hanged in public during roll call for attempted escape, whether real or alleged, or for helping others escape. The SS might hang a dozen people at once in order to terrorize the rest of the camp.

And meanwhile, the SS man in charge of roll call stood watch nice and warm inside his little hut, with its almost ridiculous weather vane on the roof indicating the direction of the wind. At Auschwitz, it is often these details that stay with you.

The crematorium at Auschwitz I

It is time for me to leave Auschwitz I. It must be around 2:30 p.m. But there is one last place to face here: the crematorium. Once again, I am alone. No group in sight. The badly fitting door seems to open onto a black void. A few flowers lie at the foot of the wall.

The building looks small. It was called "Krema I." The Nazis could dispose of 340 bodies a day in its three cremation furnaces. Later, this crematorium was shut down and replaced by those at Birkenau, and the building itself was converted into an air-raid shelter for the SS. The interior and the chimney were later reconstructed for the museum using original elements.

How do you begin to imagine what these walls witnessed when you stand in front of this concrete room with its rough opening in the ceiling? How do you picture people pressed together while poison gas was poured in through the roof?

It is with those images in mind that I leave Auschwitz I. You are already far beyond what feels bearable, and yet Birkenau takes it further still.

What stays with you after leaving Auschwitz I

I think that, by reading this account, you will understand at least in part why you need to wait until you are ready before going to Auschwitz. Why it leaves such a mark on you. And why you come back with the desire to carry that memory onward, on behalf of those who no longer can.

I spent more than six hours at Auschwitz I alone, without being able to see, read, and absorb everything. The research and documentation work carried out by the museum is extraordinary. Beyond the sheer volume of material gathered, there are explanations everywhere attempting to put words to the history of the camp. It would take several days to read it all properly.

Now I am going to take you somewhere else, to Auschwitz II - Birkenau, a vast and almost indescribable camp where you keep walking and walking before you reach the far end...