It was still dark and terribly cold, a grubby snow was falling and the wind from the east cut through me. If I had been hoping for the worst welcome to punish me for returning to the scene of my father’s crimes, I got my wish, but it was still far from enough. For a prisoner arriving here on the death train, there were many things that made their arrival infinitely more cruel – the exhaustion of having had to stand for days in crowded cattle trucks, the hunger, the thirst, the filth, the panic, the fear, the torture of the selection process, the pomp and ceremony, the contemptuous orders, the barking dogs, the brutality of the soldiers, the humiliation of having to undress outdoors, the shaving of the hair, the tattooing of a number on the forearm, and, over everything, the overpowering sense that something incalculable and terrible has happened here: it was here that humanity ended, betrayed by God Himself. Were they still men when they arrived in the camp? Arriving here on a tourist train on a bright spring day would have been obscene. I am not just any visitor, I am Helmut Schiller, son of SS Officer Hans Schiller, and in this place lie my father’s share of 1,300,000 dead, gassed for the most part, shot in the head if they were lucky. I had only one choice, to arrive as my father had, in a warm car, calm, perhaps preoccupied by some technical problem, or arrive like a prisoner, terrified, starving, numb, soaked to the skin, more alone than anyone in the world, traumatised by what was going on, not knowing what was expected of him, of him in particular. I wanted to approximate the reality of a prisoner arriving here, wanted to know how far my father had come. But I know that this atrocity beggars belief, that nothing and no one could bring me even a fraction of an inch closer to understanding it. I am free, I came here of my own free will, I stand here a free man, I have my hair, I have teeth, I have my papers in my pocket, and, barring some accident, murder, a fatal illness or suicide in a moment of madness, I know that I will be alive tomorrow, and the day after, and the day after that and so on to the end of my days. I cannot make myself a camp prisoner, a guinea pig in a Nazi laboratory, a Sonderkommando or a Kapo, all I can do is slip into my father’s thoughts, retrace his footsteps, try to follow his terrible path; I can do nothing but try to empathise with a prisoner, to feel as he must have felt as death, mysterious and degrading, swept over him. I can do nothing. But I am here, I had to come, and I must go on to the end.