I followed the tracks for the death train from the Jewish platform, the Judenrampe. In the distance, barring the horizon, is the building that appears in every book, a long, low, red-brick building with a red-tiled roof and a watchtower in the middle, straddling the tracks. This is Auschwitz II, Konzentrationslager Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Past the entrance arch, barracks stretch out endlessly in serried ranks. On one side is the women’s camp, on the other, the men’s and everywhere you look, watchtowers, barbed wire, electrified fences. There can be no mistake that hell was once built here, not long ago, everything is still as it was, everything is ashes and solitude just as it once was. Here, in Birkenau, evil reached its apogee. To the east is Auschwitz-I, the wrought-iron gate crowned with the famous motto: Arbeit macht frei. Work shall set you free. Inside, in what was once a high-security area, is the Krupp armaments factory, the DAW, the Deutschen Ausrüstungswerke factories, the SS Werkstätten – workstations, the general pharmacy and a number of hospital blocks known as the HKB, the Häftlings-Krankenbau for soldiers and Arbeiter. Three kilometres to the north is Auschwitz-III Monowitz. The great, grey complex of buildings you can glimpse through the mist was occupied by IG Farbenindustrie, which specialised in making Zyklon B, fertilisers and detergents. You have to picture them: the buildings are no longer there, they were bombed in 1944 and later razed. You can still see the foundations. In the Buna-Werke, another complex which was bombed and razed, synthetic rubber essential to the Third Reich was made. Ten thousand prisoners worked in gruelling shifts. I don’t believe a single one emerged alive, they knew too much, the secrets of production, they had had contact with military secrets far ahead of their time. The last Arbeiter were massacred during the chaos after the Soviet army marched into Poland and its units advanced on the camps at breakneck speed, trying to get there before everything was destroyed or removed.