I hid in the shadows so I could watch her. Head tilted to one side, she was toying with her handkerchief in her lap, folding and unfolding it, rolling it into a ball and unrolling it again. In her mind, I thought, she was very far away. After half an hour, she got up, gave a little sigh and headed east towards the gas chambers and the crematoria. There was a crowd. Tourists. A group of kids, schoolchildren and an adult group. They were listening to their respective guides. The kids were taking photographs, whispering to each other. What they wanted was to shout, to ask real questions, but this was not a place where conversation was customary, those who came here were gassed, incinerated, rose in a column of smoke, they knew that. The older group said nothing, they stood motionless. The woman joined the older group. She said something to the man standing next to her, who put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her on the forehead. The gesture of a friend. I joined the group. The guide was talking, explaining. I didn’t like his voice, there was something wrong about the tone. What irritated me was that he was trapped in his books, in his technical reports, what he was describing was a process. That is not what extermination is! Not just that. It cannot be brought down to its final act. There is everything else, the most important part, the part that is nameless, the everyday evil that you quickly grow accustomed to, that you never grow accustomed to, that thing which the old woman instinctively understood, that thing that I have been trying desperately to understand for months without even coming a fraction of an inch closer. I had felt this from the first: I could know my father, know myself, by following his path to the end, to the heart of the Machine. But no knowledge, no intelligence, no compassion, no imagination can achieve what experiencing the genocide has etched on the minds of the prisoners, and they, the survivors, have no means of communicating it to us. My father will forever be a mystery, and my pain will know no end.

The group moved on. I positioned myself so that I would be walking beside the little old woman. We struck up a conversation. She spoke English with a thick Mitteleuropean accent I couldn’t quite place. She told me she was born in Czechoslovakia, in Bratislava, but had been living in New York since ’48. I told her I was French and that I lived on the outskirts of Paris. When I felt we were getting on well, I said, ‘Were you in Birkenau?’

She blushed and said, ‘Oh, no, not me, my sister Nina was sent here. I was at Buchenwald . . . with my parents.’

‘Your sister . . . did she die here?’

‘Yes. I found out from a friend who was at Birkenau with her . . . She died last year.’

‘Mmm-hmm.’