Auschwitz -Birkenau is the worst place in the world, but everyone needs to see it once in their lifetime.

If you’re hesitant to add Auschwitz to your itinerary, you’re not alone. The full-day experience is draining, if not soul destroying. Any sane traveller who has an understanding of what took place here should know it is a commitment that you will remember forever. I came away from it emotionally shattered and I’d argue that is the point. The camp stands as a defiant memorial to the worst genocide in human history.

During the well documented reign of the Third Reich, 15-20 million innocent people were imprisoned in camps all across Europe, yet the overall number of victims and camps is difficult to know for certain. By 1945, 11 million Jews , Soviet POW’s, ethnic Poles, Slavs, gays, and other minorities, had been exterminated. This includes over one million children. At Auschwitz-Birkenau alone, an estimated 1.3 million people were murdered inside the immense facilities built by the Nazis in Poland. It was industrialised mass murder on a scale which is hard to describe let alone comprehend unless you see it in the flesh. It is vitally important to stress too, that Auschwitz-Birkenau may be the most infamous, but there are countless other camps that rivalled its terror and systematic brutality.

The very first thing I noticed on the drive from Krakow to Auschwitz-Birkenau was the normality of the surrounding countryside. We saw idyllic villages and farms between thick woods, and in the back-end of summer, the warm sun kissed a suddenly open and green landscape. It was quiet and beautiful. I had no-idea that we’d arrived as the van pulled up in a shady picnic area cloaked in browny-red trees. As we filed out, I saw dozens of buses and roughly two hundred tourists and school children milling about – eating lunch before their tours began. The nice people, who we’d chatted to on the drive over, were now making awkward conversation over lunch, others were too. The talking petered out as if the collective wised up to what lurked beyond a large ashen building at the far end. Anything but silence suddenly felt disrespectful. I personally tuned right out, and attempted to get a handle on my expectations and my apprehension. I have always been somewhat empathic. I pick-up on the emotions of others fairly easily so the mix of unease and awkward laughter on the air was really getting to me more than I’d care to admit.

I did not know this, but Auschwitz consisted of three main camps spread throughout the area and another 40 sub-camps. The tour was in two parts: Auschwitz I, & Auschwitz II Birkenau.

We started in Auschwitz I, entering through the iron gates with the hideously disturbing words “Work sets you free” sprawled above it. At first glance, the brick buildings and paved streets shrouded in the crimson-hue of the trees, was eerily stunning. I remember walking twenty feet when I was hit by a sense of foreboding. It was like nothing I have ever experienced. The high grey walls, razor wire, and guard towers, made it very clear that there was no escape once you were inside here. There was pressure on my chest as I walked the street seeing the only surviving gas chamber at the far end. Our guide described how the impressive buildings were all built by the prisoners. We stopped at the end of the lane at a tall, deceptively pretty building with a sloped roof. It was once known as the hospital of Auschwitz. It was also where, Dr Josef Mengele, conducted his abhorrent medical research.

Mengele was known as the “Angel of Death” and no-one wanted to go near the hospital when the camp was running. He, and his staff of SS physicians, operated on patients without anaesthetic, practised sterilisation techniques on pregnant women, and exposed prisoners to diseases just to see how long it took them to die. He was notorious for experimenting on twins and dwarfs, and his fixation was often the only reason saving them from the gas chambers. Prisoners with minor injuries from hard labour often never returned from the hospital and soon they refused to go there. An unimaginably painful death inside Mengele’s personal laboratory of torture was perhaps a worse fate than the gas chambers. He inevitably sent his subjects to them when he was done, regardless.

We entered the museum and came to a long corridor with a viewing window roughly fifty feet long. White human hair filled the compartment behind the glass to the height of about seven feet all the way down without pause. We were looking at the remains of hundreds of thousands of people and it was only a snapshot of the amount that the Russians found when they liberated the camp. Behind a similar window, we saw a mountain of suitcases taken from new arrivals as they disembarked the train. The final exhibition was again, a window. It looked into a dark room with a sliver of light. The room was overflowing with baby’s shoes. Thousands of little shoes piled up like a sand dune. If they weren’t chosen for Mengele’s sadistic experiments, the children that came to Auschwitz were always the first to be murdered. Ripped from the arms of their parents, they were marched to gas chambers by the SS to die alone. As those around me sobbed gently I had to leave. I felt utterly sick. I found the sunshine outside and took and a deep breath.

No-one spoke as the bus drove us to a flat green plain toward Auschwitz II, Birkenau. Quickly coming into view was the recognisable “Gate of death”, a red-bricked gatehouse that arches over the rail-line, that, for years fed the camp with victims. The picture above is the only photo I took on our entire tour. I didn’t want to take any pictures in this horrible place and debated whether I should take this one at all. I can’t even recall why I did in the end. There were tourists who were taking hundreds of snaps but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it.

Auschwitz II is a monstrous place. It had to be the size of at least twenty soccer fields. Boxed in by fences topped with razor wire and guard towers that once housed machine guns. The dozens of surviving prisoner barracks are in good condition and again, they give you a small snapshot of what the camp must have looked like in the 1940’s. Tragically, Auschwitz II it was designed with efficiency in mind. Once through the gatehouse, the prisoners disembarking the train were sorted into sex, and after that, every direction led to a gas chamber. A sensation of disbelief and emotional unease was ever present walking the never ending lanes of bunkhouses and I tried to fathom what it must’ve been like for the people that were brought here. The unimaginable fear of what each minute, hour, and day would have felt like.

Well versed in the Second World War and the atrocities committed by Nazi Germany, I thought I was prepared for what I would see but I was wrong. Auschwitz is a deeply sobering experience that touched me on a profoundly spiritual level. Walking the grounds, and then the memorial of the now demolished gas chamber, you can feel that something monstrously evil happened here as if the suffering of all those people is entombed within the fence. At night I can only imagine how haunted it must feel.

It is the worst place in the world but I knew I had to see it. As a tourist and a traveller who enjoys every freedom in the world, I had to pay my respects to those who weren’t given that chance. Never before have so many innocent souls been ripped from this world in such a calculated and vile manner. Auschwitz stands as a beacon of what humanity is capable of in its darkest moments. It should not be glorified, but it should be remembered. For many Jews, Auschwitz is a place of pilgrimage, and in all the horror, there are tremendous stories of courage and humanity here told by the survivors who managed to turn unimaginable grief and suffering into a something meaningful and positive. It is a story that needs to be told to every generation so that the memory of Auschwitz doesn’t slip into the forgotten. We must never allow ourselves to repeat it.

Signing off.