The name Auschwitz is the German version of the Polish town Oświęcim, located about 40 miles (64 km) west of Kraków. After Germany invaded Poland in 1939, the region was annexed into the Third Reich.
In 1940, Nazi Germany established a concentration camp on the outskirts of Oświęcim, known today as Auschwitz I, or the Main Camp. In 1941, they began building a much larger killing center two miles away in the village of Brzezinka, renamed Birkenau. This site — Auschwitz II — became the heart of the extermination process.
That is the geography and the history. But what I found when I arrived went far beyond what books and maps can convey.
Despite years of studying photographs, listening to survivor testimonies, and watching documentaries, nothing prepared me for Auschwitz II–Birkenau. Not its immense scale, nor the unsettling quiet that hung over the gray May morning in 2025 when I arrived.
In September 1982, I visited Dachau with my father. He had been imprisoned at HASAG, a Nazi forced labor camp in Częstochowa, and was later transferred through a series of camps as the Nazis evacuated prisoners westward in the final stages of the war. In 1944, he was sent from HASAG to Gross-Rosen, then to Flossenbürg, and finally to Dachau.
One of his most harrowing memories was the transfer from Flossenbürg to Dachau. Along with 500 other prisoners, he was first forced to march, then packed into freight cars “like cattle,” as he later described in a 1973 interview with the Pittsburgh Press. Only 18 of the 500 survived the journey. My father was one of them.
During our visit to Dachau in 1982, my father shared this story in German with a group of high school students. Hearing him speak about what he had endured—on the very ground where his imprisonment had ended—moved me deeply. Yet even with that experience, Birkenau struck me in ways I hadn’t expected.
Although Dachau had a gas chamber, historical evidence suggests it was never used for mass executions. It was equipped and capable—part of the same machinery of terror—but not used systematically for mass murder like the crematoria at Auschwitz-Birkenau. Most deaths at Dachau occurred through forced labor, shootings, disease, and medical experiments. Still, standing in that room with my father years ago was sobering. Even unused, the gas chamber embodied the intent of a system built on death.
His brother—my uncle—was deported to Auschwitz and survived. He was among those liberated when the Red Army arrived in January 1945. These are not just historical facts to me; they are the roots of my identity.
So I came to Auschwitz not as a historian, nor just as a photographer, but as a son and a nephew. I didn’t come seeking understanding—I don’t believe Auschwitz can be understood. I came to listen, to stand where memory persists, and to bear witness.
What struck me most wasn’t a particular building or exhibit, but the vastness of Birkenau. It spans roughly 346 acres—more than half a square mile of barracks, chimneys, tracks, and ruins. It felt like a mechanized landscape of erasure, a place where lives were reduced, processed, and obliterated. The train tracks still slice through the camp. Rows of chimneys stretch toward the forest line. The emptiness felt both infinite and suffocating. At one point, I stopped walking and heard only the gravel under my shoes and the wind moving through the wire. It was a silence not of peace, but of reverberation.
Auschwitz is one of the most visited Holocaust memorial sites in the world. In recent years, more than two million people a year have come—students, families, descendants of survivors, visitors from every corner of the globe. That fact lingered with me as I walked. I knew I was one of many, yet I felt completely alone.
During my visit, I saw two groups of Israelis. The first were students, draped respectfully in Israeli flags, walking the grounds where their history was nearly erased. The second were soldiers in uniform—quiet, focused, listening intently to their guides. They were not tourists, but heirs to a story that had nearly ended here. Their presence filled me with quiet pride and a sense of defiance. It felt like an answer—a living affirmation of survival and responsibility.
I also visited the crematorium at Auschwitz I—preserved as part of the museum—and later, the ruins of the much larger gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau. These were the industrial centers of death.
The crematorium at Auschwitz I surprised me with its scale. It was smaller and more intimate than I had expected—but no less chilling. It was an early site of killing, later eclipsed by the vast machinery of death at Birkenau. There, the system of extermination became larger, more efficient, and partially hidden underground. Seeing the shattered remains of those later structures brought the full scope of the killing into terrifying clarity.
At Birkenau, the ruins sit in quiet collapse, half-swallowed by the earth. It’s one thing to know what happened there. It’s another to stand where it happened. The deliberate effort to erase these places—and the lives taken within them—was itself part of the crime.
I’m grateful to the many Poles who have preserved this site with care. I recognize that Auschwitz was built and operated by Germans, and that the responsibility for the Holocaust rests with them. But it would be dishonest to say I felt only gratitude. My visit stirred unease. Poland’s relationship with its Jewish past is complicated—marked by courage and complicity, remembrance and denial. Antisemitism did not begin or end with the camps. That truth is hard to ignore.
Still, I didn’t come to accuse. I came with questions. I came because I needed to be in the place where history and memory hang so heavily that even the air feels changed.
I left without answers. But I left with something else: a deeper connection to the voices that once filled this place, and a stronger sense of responsibility to keep their stories alive.
Memory alone is not enough. But without memory, nothing remains.
