I walked Auschwitz alone. It took me two days to get through it.

When I left off trying to put this story into words, I think I said that I was crying. I didn’t actually stop crying for that entire day, but eventually I was able to breathe again.

The other visitors to Auschwitz-Birkenau all wore the same face. When they stepped out into the sunlight from the dusty dark interior of the crematorium, when they trudged up the stairs from the basement of Block 11, the look in their eyes was shocked and haunted, horrified and tired.

A sign at the entrance to the crematorium reads, simply:

“You are about to enter a place where thousands of innocent people were killed. Please behave accordingly.”

And it’s dark in there, so dark…

I walked the paths between the blocks in something like a daze. I stumbled upon the simple wooden gallows, saw the cruel black hook from which they hung. It was a little way back from the path, and many kept their distance, and I don’t know why but I marched right up and stood in front of it. I felt like there was something or someone there who wanted something from me, like street people asking for spare change. And I couldn’t do anything for them.

Auschwitz I is the part of the museum that has been preserved in the condition it was in when it was a fully functional concentration and extermination camp. In some places it has been reconstructed to show what it was like in the early 1940’s.

That place is evil.

I saw the barbed wire fences. I saw the memorial on the death wall, the place where the rebellious were shot. I saw the glass display case full of children’s shoes, piled higher than I am tall.

I read about the persecution of many different peoples – the Roma and Sinai, the Greeks, the Poles. I read about the experiments performed on women and women’s reproductive systems without anesthetic and without their consent.

I read about the underground ways that people were good to each other. The secretaries who managed to alter records and help their families and friends. The nurses who saved sick women from the gas chambers at the last minute.

I read about the ways that people sold each other out. One man lost his freedom in exchange for twenty US dollars.

I read about families being separated from each other at the gates. Men to the left, women and children to the right, and people clinging to each other, and mothers forcing their children to let go, telling them to take care of each other.

I got to a point where I physically could not read any more. The signs are written in capital white letters on smooth black wood, in English, Yiddish and Hebrew. I could pick out the words, the letters, but I could not make them make make sense.

I kept trying. I’d step inside a building, look around me, maybe snap a photo, see a few panels of an exhibit, and need to step outside into the sun again, take big, deep gulps if cleaner air and lean against the walls. Once I turned and thought I saw a figure of a man in the corner of my eye, crouched, grinning at me, even laughing. But when I looked back he had gone.

I walked out.

I’d barely seen a third of Auschwitz I, and I couldn’t do it any more.

I walked in the general direction of Birkenau. I didn’t have any idea when the camps would close. The sun was going down behind the death-gate, when I got there, and a woman behind the counter at the bookstore told me they were closed. “You’ll have to come back tomorrow,” she told me, not unkindly.

Until that moment, it had not occurred to me that I could.

I spent my walk back to the train station feeling horrible because I hadn’t been able to make it through.

I’d come all this way, and I’d seen so many things, and I’d learned so much, and I’d loved a child and I’d lost her, and I’d traveled for miles and miles to get to a place she was taken before she died, and I hadn’t been able to do it. I felt like I’d failed.

I somehow made it back to my hostel. I talked to Sara and I talked to Cris. They were the people who knew where I’d been, that day. Cris told me that he didn’t think it was disrespectful to the horrors of what happened to say “I see this, and I need to step back and take a breath,” and that trying to look and physically not being able to is not the same thing and never looking at all. Sara told me that I’m not obligated to anything, and pulled a tarot card for me that said I would be enlightened by this experience and that I would be able to separate from this experience soon.

I slept a little. I woke up at 5AM because the Cheese Guy was snoring in the next bunk. I went downstairs.

I made coffee. I remembered meeting an old Italian grandmother in the hostel kitchen who had just gotten back from visiting the camps and was moving in to elsewhere that night. I told her I was going, too, and we shared a moment of sadness. She gave me a coupon for free coffee in a random place in Kraków that she wasn’t going to be able to use.

I wrote a little, and I thought, and looked at bus schedules. And I thought some more.

And I booked a bus ticket back to Oświęcim.