Today was a reflective day; picked up in a small minibus and driven  West with the sisters of mercy, the cure and joy division playing on the radio, I complemented him on his choice of radio station and we both agreed that pop music is ok, but really it is for people younger than myself; a low to middling 50, perfectly formed, with a little sagging around the edges.

Driving west we climbed out of the city and headed towards the landscapes which we can all recognise form film and documentary, forests, closely planted of pine and fir, presumably for logging and silver birch, fighting for light with the evergreens, tall and thin, like ghosts standing together, a premonition of what is to come. Beech trees shedding their leaves later creates a golden brown crunchy carpet below the trees, but the overwhelming sense of bleakness resounds as the forests fight to protect the terrible secrets that they keep. 

It’s amazing how life goes on in and around Auschwitz and Birkenau, scenes of the most unspeakable cruelty, death and torture, masochistic surgery, macabre experimentation on live subjects, children and women. To see the place with my own eyes was incredibly helpful to understand the sheer scale of this industrial cruelty, like everyone I have seen the films; the boy in striped pyjamas, Schindlers list, Shoah, but to see the site where a lot of this stuff happened, preserved and so expertly explained through our guide was beyond descriptive words. I’ve never been on a tour where absolutely no one makes a stupid quip, only a very low murmer as couples whisper to each other in utter disbelief or revulsion, a room with a glass floor to ceiling  case along the whole side full of suitcases, another room with the same full of shoes, another prosthetic limbs and disability aids, another with human hair, still plaited in many cases and  shaved from the corpses left for a special squad of prisoners, kept apart from their compatriots and left to tidy up the mess, shave the heads, take out the gold teeth, and dump the dead into huge furnaces unceremoniously day and night, relentlessly. 

The sorting platforms at the end of the line in Birkenau were the final destination for over 1.5million desperate people, a majority of whom were jews, and these people came from as far afield as Norway and Rhodes, to the centre of the wretched web, the monster that is Auschwitz. But as we walked silently through the collapsed camp accommodation in Birkenau, 3km from Auschwitz, you notice farmers ploughing the fields outside the barbed wire fencing, life goes on. People knew what was going on, but people probably could not or were not willing to accept it, as the smoke billowed out of the incinerators day after day, hour after hour, and the ashes were unceremoniously dumped into the river turning it a winter grey as it threaded past the whispering silver birch.

I really don’t know what else to say about this place, but I believe that everyone alive should come here, if they can. Thousands of people have told their story far better that I could ever hope to , but I hope my little travelogue sits respectfully somewhere in a little corner of the internet. I really didn’t want to come yesterday morning as we stood by the side of the road waiting to be picked up, and was thinking that if the bus didn’t turn up then it wouldn’t be the end of the world. For these poor folk, Birkenau and Auschwitz really was the end of the world.