My roommates had visited Auschwitz the day before, and onceI told them that it was my plan for the day, they wasted no time in describing their tour through the camp until I had to leave to meet my tour group. The hostel receptionist must have sensed my excitement, as she let me leave my large backpack in a storage room instead of taking it with me. 

I was supposed to meet the tour group at a nearby bus stop, andI was thankful to find the city easier to navigate in daylight than I had the night before. Understanding the crudity of my map helped too, realizing that what looked like a river was actually a grass field. I climbed on board the bus and sat down next to the window, where I could look out at the statues in the street until we departed.

As we drove across the countryside, a documentary of the camp played on the bus’s small TV monitors, keeping us occupied until we could arrive and meet our guide. A shorter woman with surprisingly good English, despite the local accent, she led us into the Auschwitz I camp through the infamous gates over which the words "Work Makes You Free" read in German.

Formerly a Polish barracks, built before Nazi occupation, the brick buildings of Auschwitz I might have looked nice were it not for the dark history of the place. As I imagined how it could have looked in the springtime, with big leafy trees lining the streets and alleys, we were led past an execution wall memorialized with flowers and bullet holes. This was no longer a place of pretty buildings, but a place of death. 

We were then taken into one of the barracks, now transformed into a museum of "artifacts." One room held a glassed-in wall filled human hair, easily 1500 cubic feet in size. Another wall had clothes and Nazi uniforms made from hair, showing just how thin Germany's resources were stretched during the war. The next room was filled with eyeglasses. Another room, filled with pots and pans. Another of brushes and combs. Another filled with suitcases, still marked for identification by their owners. And then there were the shoes, filling an entire hallway, nearly 50' long. Clogs, heels, loafers, sandals, and more, over 8,000 in all, but only a small fraction of the people who suffered there.

We left Auschwitz I for what remained of Birkenau, the main death camp. With the Allies on the offense, Germany was beginning to realize it had little hope for winning the war and, as Russia drove westward, the Nazis began to hide all traces of the camps. Most of Birkenau had been destroyed, leaving mostly a flat field and a few reconstructed barrack/sheds that the inmates would've used. I had expected a more somber experience, knowing the history involved, but knowing and seeing are two different things, and there was very little to see.