It was eerie, going back.

The first time everything had felt unfamiliar. The second time it felt like I was stepping back in time to the previous day, and living it over again.

Except that I got to the bus station early, instead of running for twenty minutes to get to a bus that I knew would leave in twenty-five. And this time, I knew where the bathrooms were, where to store my luggage, where the information desk was, where the shuttle bus was going.

I went to the information desk to ask for help. In a voice that was much clearer and more confident than I was feeling, I said: “I was here yesterday and I saw Auschwitz I. Today I’ve come back because I want to see Auschwitz II. How do I do that?”

The woman on the other side of the glass looked surprised, but she told me what to do.

I would not need a ticket this time. Aside from a few places that are roped off because they are unsafe, Birkenau is completely open to the public during the day.

I took the bus instead of walking. I told my parents where I was going.

When I got to the gate, I started to feel cold and shaky again.

I called in the Grandfathers. I had never done that for myself before. I was clumsy but I did it, and I can confidently say that I felt more supported and less alone. My mind was clear.

You can still smell the ashes. It’s a metallic tang, in the air, in the back of your throat.

Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau has been mostly reduced to ruins. It’s rubble, and ashes, and barbed-wire fences, and it is heart-wrenchingly vast.

The first thing I saw when I got through the gates was a faint rainbow in the sky above what used to be the woman’s barracks. It made my heart sing.

I walked a worn dirt road lined with barbed wire fencing, so long and straight that it seemed to go on forever. Those selected for death in the gas chambers were herded along that same road.

All around me, there were the ruins of the men’s camp, the places they used to sleep and eat and hurt on the inside and out. Here, the only remaining corner of a red brick building, there, a free standing chimney. Everywhere rectangular remnants of stone foundations, overgrown with moss and lichen and wildflowers and tall grass. It seemed to stretch on for as far as the eye could see in all directions, all that was left of this place that used to house an industry of dying.

It was so quiet there, so peaceful. I have never been anywhere with as much solemn-ness and reverence as that place. In its own way, it’s strangely beautiful.

I finally got to the end of the road, and stopped walking. I remembered something from a book I’d read about a man who asked his friends to say Kaddish for him after he died, and they’d forgotten.

I tried to say it for all of them. I didn’t know how. It’s a Jewish prayer that is said when someone dies, but is less about death than the greatness of their God. I found the English translation of the words on the first page of google and I don’t know if I did it right, but I tried for them.

I kept walking. I kept expecting someone to come yell at me for walking on the grass, but no one did.

I touched the still barbed wire fencing and found that it was cold. I walked past a pile of broken ceramic, smashed into beyond recognizable shapes.

I stumbled on a memorial to the Roma and Sinai people that were killed here. I overheard a group of visitors praying together and singing, and I stopped to listen. I witnessed a military ceremony, young people standing to attention, bearing flags with blue and white stars of David, listening to a woman singing in a language I did not understand.

I began to think that Birkenau has become almost as full of grief and prayer and loving memory as prejudice and cruelty and dying.

That thought was challenged almost as soon as I’d thought of it. Because that was when I walked alone through the building where the initiations of new arrivals in the camp took place.

These people – people who had been taken from their homes and lives, who had just been ripped away from their loved ones – were stripped naked in the cold among strangers. The pregnant women who had escaped the gas chambers in the first selection because their clothing concealed their condition were particularly vulnerable here. They were sterilized and cleaned. Their hair was shaved, regardless of gender. They were tattooed with numbers that replaced their names. They were stripped of their person-hood, in that building. Anne’s hair was shaven off, possibly so quickly and carelessly as to injure her in the process. In that room. I know, because she lived at Auschwitz, because her mother died at Auschwitz, because she and her sister were spared at Auschwitz, only to die in a typhus outbreak at Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, where their bodies were thrown into a mass grave.

These people’s worlds were ripped apart and thrown unceremoniously into the bottom of a pond, which is still murky with ashes…

I walked out of Birkenau along the railroad ties at sunset. It occurs to me to wonder whether or not it was built by slaves.

It’s not this place that frightens me.

It’s the fact that it came to be.

Otto Frank believed that it is everyone’s responsibility to fight prejudice.

I stepped outside of the death gate. I found my way back to the edge of the woods where I’d called in the Grandfathers and lit the candle for something to focus on and said “thank you. It’s okay to go now. I’m okay,” and blew the candle out.

And I took a piece of chocolate from the bookstore and threw it into the woods, as an offering…

Never again.