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[title]It’s the train tracks that stay with you.
I’m standing on the infamous so-called ramp at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. A slightly elevated strip, it’s where more than a million victims of the Holocaust were unloaded from cattle carriages. SS guards and medical orderlies met 437,000 Hungarian Jews alone between May and July 1944, deciding who would live – for a time at least – and who went straight to the gas chambers.
There are several names with black crosses next to them on my family tree. Hungarian Jews. Did they once stand where I am now?
My aunt, cousin and I have come by coach from the pretty medieval city of Krakow, an hour or so away through unremarkable Polish countryside. We booked online (€30-50) – the official Auschwitz website will point you in the right direction – and a tour guide accompanies us for our three or four hours here, sharing facts and insights via individual headsets. It makes the visit a solitary business, despite the many other groups that crisscross around us. Which feels about right – you rarely feel like chatting.
As a film journalist, everything has a habit of coming back to movies for me. Shoah, French documentarian Claude Lanzmann’s great, nine-hour-plus opus of the Holocaust, is a big one. Schindler’s List, of course, which was partly filmed on the other side of Birkenau’s infamous Gates of Death (you can’t shoot feature films inside the camp these days).
And more than one friend has suggested that this is my A Real Pain weekend – and it’s true: the Jesse Eisenberg and Kieran Culkin two-hander about estranged cousins connecting with their grandma’s Polish roots made a big impression on me. I love what it says about how we process our family histories, how they reflect who we are back at us in honest but not always flattering terms. In the movie, the characters visit another camp – the smaller Majdanek outside Lublin (they were allowed to film there) – but the experience tallies.
It’s bitingly cold at Birkenau today, a funereal sky hanging over this vast stretch of reclaimed marshland near the River Vistula. Most of the prisoners’ blocks – jerry-built, unsanitary wooden sheds that offered little protection from rain or cold – are there only in outline now, but the tour does take in one of the few dozen still standing.
To the right of the tracks, the camp stretches off towards the 40-square-kilometer Zone of Interest that surrounded Auschwitz-Birkenau. Our guide points to the distant tree line, explaining that there were plans to continue the camps’ expansion even as the war was being lost. For the Nazis, the killing went on and on. Killing was the point.
I’ve never been anywhere as bleak as Birkenau. They say that the land can hold trauma, and this landscape is soaked in it. Our route through the camp passes the charred ruins of a gas chamber. The Nazis blew it up as the Soviet army approached in early 1945, like serial criminals concealing one offense in the hope no one noticed the thousands of others. The ashes of countless people blew across this land, we’re told. How do you get your head around that?
Not even Auschwitz itself, a 10-minute drive away across the Polish town of Oświęci, is quite as scouring an experience. That’s where the visit begins, next to the car park and a canteen where you can get lunch before, or, if you still feel like it, after your tour.
‘They say the land can hold trauma, and this landscape is soaked in it’
It’s a tough balance for the Auschwitz Museum to strike: to make things comfortable for the nearly two million visitors who come here each year, without hitting a kitsch or exploitative note. Obviously, it’s not a place to pick up fridge magnets and tea towels, but the bookshop does stock Primo Levi and Viktor Frankl’s writing, as well as biographies of SS camp commandant Rudolf Höss and other histories of the camps.
A tunnel transitions you from these tourist amenities to the camp proper, while a hushed PA intones the names of the dead, one after another. The museum has strict visitor guidelines for what’s okay and what’s not – they’re probably relieved that the selfie stick era seems to have passed. You walk through those metal gates that read ‘Arbeit Macht Frei’ – ‘work will make you free’ – one of the Nazis’ mordant jokes on their victims.
Konzentrationslager (KL) Auschwitz is much as the Nazis left it and the Soviets found it in January 1945. Before the war it had been a Polish army barracks. Now, it’s a memorial and museum. Each of the brick blocks tells a different story of horror and, in some cases, survival. Mountains of shoes, some of them tiny, lends a ghastly sense of scale. One display holds the hair of more than 30,000 people.
Of course, you can’t hear the snarl of Alsatians, the shouting of guards or the crack of rifle fire – watch Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest to experience that soundscape – but you can still feel the vast cruelty. The so-called Punishment Block houses suffocation, starvation and standing cells. The first two are self-explanatory; the third, almost too sadistic to explain here. A perverse pretence at justice was provided by the courtroom next to the entrance. No one was found innocent. Five or six thousand people were shot against the wall outside.
There are moments when I’m conscious of a face gazing from out of the past. One corridor in another block is lined with portrait shots of shaven-headed prisoners, listing occupations and dates of arrival and death. Students, farmers, engineers. Two or three months seems roughly the average lifespan. A handful survived for a year or more. Enlarged photographs of those Birkenau ramps found, improbably, in an SS photo album after the war, fill the wall with the puzzled, frightened looks of children. They stay with you.
As you can probably gather, this is not a fun day out. But it's meaningful to be here, trying to grapple with what happened – and why. We’re regularly reminded by our guides of the great Nazi lie: that the train to Auschwitz was a passport to a new, better life in the east. Resettlement was nothing to fear.
‘There are moments when I'm conscious of a face gazing out from the past’
A 2021 quote from the Austrian president, Alexander Van der Bellen, adorns one of the walls: ‘Auschwitz didn't suddenly fall from the sky.’ Everywhere is a silent encouragement to pick up a history book, to learn how this genocide came to pass. That it spilled out of what was once a functioning democracy. And in this particular political moment – where even in the mainstream people play with the ideas and symbols of fascism with impunity, and billionaires throw Hitler salutes – it feels even more vital to do so.
Birkenau’s train tracks may be long-disused, but standing here, it’s hard not to wonder if something is stirring at the other end of the line.
Head to visit.auschwitz.org for visiting hours, tours and historical information.