This was how I planned it, I wanted to end my journey in Auschwitz. I arrived in the early morning, I wanted to be on my own before the busloads of tourists showed up. It was going to be a long day. The camp is vast, over 45 square kilometres, more than 11,000 acres. It is a city, like the gold-rush towns that sprang up in far-off countries in an era of rampant capitalism, booming cities sprawling out from a small encampment, motivated by greed and haste, funded by new finds, new wealth; a city both orderly and chaotic, with well-defined boundaries, broad avenues, parade grounds vast enough to intimidate a marathon runner, ugly administrative buildings, posh neighbourhoods with ridiculous houses, baroque castles, opulent cathedrals, cookie-cutter working-class slums stretching out forever, a rococo theatre, an extravagant cinema, a trendy nightclub, bustling brothels and dreary bars, industrial estates, train stations and shunting yards, warehouses, anaemic parks, astonishing wastelands, the hectic markets, and the sports grounds that show the city is dying of boredom and inaction, the frightening barracks and the rudimentary runway flanked by a control tower that will soon be an aerodrome worthy of a capital. This is how they are, these vast, mushrooming cities, electrifying and monotonous, full of potential and doomed, they create wealth and poverty in equal measure and, in the end, they make poverty and violence a daily occurrence, they are madness in search of apotheosis. Here, life is sparkling, free, clever, a constant spectacle, while in the underbelly, in the measureless favelas that ring the city, people’s lives are cramped, teeming, shameful, nameless and they die with disturbing ease, die at a yes or a no. These unplanned cities, carved into the logic of the totalitarian system that created them, flourish based on a myth, and based on that same myth they die. One day, nature reasserts itself and everything silently disappears, swept away by the absurdity that created them. It was not gold that spawned this oppressive city, born out of the ashes of a poor remote village in the heart of Poland, it was not oil, or coffee, or rubber or rare metals, but the systematic extermination of the Lebensunwertes Leben, Jews preferably, and gypsies, but also political prisoners, antisocial elements, and all possible types of Minderwertige Leute. To tell the truth, this city was a powerhouse prepared to burn anything it could lay its hands on – there was no question of shutting down the furnace just because the supply of Jews dried up. In hell, everything burns, tramps and traitors, enemies and resistance fighters. Auschwitz was the largest, the most dismal, the most deadly and the most rapacious of the Nazi death camps. In four short years, 1,300,000 men, women and children, 90 per cent of them Jews, were tossed into the furnaces – an average of a thousand souls a day, the equivalent of a village wiped off the map, house by house, family by family, between daybreak and sunset.