journalism

Auschwitz I is a museum. You enter beneath a replica of the sign reading ARBEIT MACHT FREI ('Work makes you free’) and pass the spot where a band used to play as the workers marched in and out. Everything is very clean. The stench, the lice, the rats, the effluent and the dreadful, biting cold you have to imagine. The barracks that you visit have been painted and house different exhibitions. In Block 4, for example, you will see old cans of Zyklon B, the crystals used in the gas chambers. Behind a glass window, two tons of human hair is on display. Block 5 contains a vast pile of spectacles, hair brushes, abandoned suitcases and 80,000 shoes. In Block 11, you look into a cell where prisoners were deliberately starved to death. There is absolutely no point in describing the horrors of this place. It’s all so well documented. But here are my thoughts as I continued around.

It was not horror. Not yet. I did not feel hatred for the Germans – you are constantly reminded how many countries played a willing part in the transports. In one photograph I glimpsed a cattle wagon that was clearly French, marked SNCF. Nor was I moved, as some visitors are, to tears. Not even when, at the end of the tour of Auschwitz I, I stood in the gas chamber where 700 people were killed at a time. No. What I felt was a mixture of sickness and anger that any human beings, any system, could come up with something like this. But the Holocaust was allowed to happen because nobody could believe that anyone could want to do such a thing. The Jews who stepped off the trains with their luggage and their family photographs really did think they were starting a new life. Slave labour, yes. But living.

The horror came when we moved to Birkenau which – if the comparison is not itself odious – is much, much worse. For a start, it’s huge: 300 barracks on 175 hectares. It just goes on and on, utterly bleak and relentless, with nothing to catch the eye. Birkenau is very neat, purpose-built with the sort of precision that the Nazis loved and which is reflected in those endless forms – name, age, date of death. Much of it has mouldered away. You can see the remains of one crematorium, a black and twisted pile of bricks that has collapsed, finally defeated, onto itself. Nearby are the pits where the human ashes were stored before they were carried away – to be used as fertiliser. The barracks are unimaginably foul. They have been left as they were, not turned into exhibition spaces and entering them you wonder how anyone could possibly have survived before you remind yourself that, of course, they didn’t.

But it is the overall effect that will stay with me. We stood in the place where Jews disembarked from the cattle trucks and where they were selected; for work or for extermination. Black and white photographs, taken 70 years before, showed the same scene: history juxtaposed with actuality. We followed those old ghosts, taking the path to the gas chambers. I have never been anywhere more forlorn. When we left – our visit had lasted four-and-a-half hours – a blazing, white sun was setting behind the skeletal trees. The sky was cloudless, the ground covered in snow. The palest of moons had appeared, high above the gate. In the distance, I heard a dog barking. There was a baby crying. I had always known the truth of the Holocaust but that was when I truly felt it.

The entire complex is run – extremely well – by the Polish government. I chose a private tour and the guide was first class: serious, thoughtful and extremely well informed. That said, there are problems. With 1.5 million people visiting in a year, Auschwitz I can become a crush and not everyone behaves well. I had heard rumours of this but was still shocked to see it with my own eyes. A group of young Spanish girls grinning in a group hug with one of them holding up an iPhone on a selfie stick. Their backdrop? A block where sterilisation experiments were performed on women. A young man shoved his iPad into the starvation cell in front of me – even though photographs were forbidden here. Another man swore when he was asked not to smoke, throwing the cigarette down and grinding it out on what, after all, is a mass grave. Such insensitivity is said to be much worse in the summer.

You can, of course, arrive early – entrance is free before 10am. But in my view two things should change. Personally, I would ban all cameras and mobile phones from the place. Does anyone really need these pictures? And I would make all entry by application only (in fact a new internet booking system is being launched this summer). The trouble is that tours are advertised all over Krakow on boards that offer you a choice: WIELIZCA SALT MINES; AUSCHWITZ TOURS; HORSE & CARRIAGE RIDES.

This obviously demeans the experience and encourages some tourists to go on a whim. It is vital that Auschwitz is open to everyone but perhaps making the process just a little more difficult might prepare visitors and force them to enter in the right frame of mind.

I actually stayed in Krakow the day before I set out for Auschwitz and even in grey, winter weather, I thought it quite lovely; a medieval city that has survived, pretty much unscathed, to the present day. Tourists come and go in a weekend but in fact the longer you stay, the more it will reward you with more than a 150 churches, one of the largest market squares in Europe with a 14th-century cloth hall, handsome, cobbled streets, a narrow park that surrounds the entire city and – unexpectedly – a stretch of the old wall with just three remaining towers, beautifully lit at night. At the same time, it’s small enough to walk anywhere and I took an excellent four-hour walking tour with a guide who showed me the university area, the royal palace, the cathedral, the old town and much more. She also took me into the attractive Jewish quarter although the number of Jews who remain in Krakow is now in the low hundreds. There were 65,000 before the war.

There are dozens of lively (well-priced) restaurants and cafés to choose from, but I particularly liked Pod Aniolami (Under the Angels), where you can eat really good Polish cuisine in a cosy cellar that dates back to the 15th century. They claim their dumplings are the best in Poland and they may well be right. Another restaurant, W Starej Kuchni on St Tomasza’s Street was equally good, very simple and welcoming – and half the price. But my favourite place in Krakow had to be Camelot, just off the main square. This delightful, eclectic café and wine bar is about as middle European as you can get. Try the rose liqueur. And if you’re feeling brave, head for one of the cabaret performances downstairs. And I stayed at the Hotel Copernicus, perfectly situated in Kanonicza Street, the oldest street in Krakow, just minutes from the royal castle. This is a fine old hotel, part of the reliable Relais & Châteaux group. The cellars in the basement house a gym, sauna and marvellously eccentric swimming pool. Only the public spaces let it down. And they should definitely turn off the music at breakfast.

I am aware that there is something that is inherently disturbing in what I have written. In the space of 1,600 words, I have slipped from torture and organised brutality to the joys of good food and comfortable hotels. Am I guilty of the same insensitivity as those Spanish girls? Should I be ashamed?

But this was my experience, my long weekend in Poland. And I am reminded of something our guide said as he showed us around Auschwitz. We are very privileged to be able to look back on what happened and we must learn to live with it. An ordinary family now lives in Rudolf Hoess’s house. A new housing estate stretches almost to the barbed wire perimeter of Birkenau. Life, for us, continues. If you go to Auschwitz, you will understand what I mean. It didn’t change me. It didn’t even depress me. But it lit a dark flame inside me and I think that flame will burn for the rest of my life.