Everyone needs to be reminded of what Auschwitz was about, writes John Fleming
When you pass under the "Work Sets You Free" mockery of the portal to Auschwitz I concentration camp, you might think you know what to expect.
An atrocity exhibition. In the first building, there are several swimming pool-sized displays. Tooth brushes. Hair brushes. Shaving brushes. Tens of thousands of them.
Then there are suitcases - each with the name and origin of its owner. There are shoes; then children's shoes.
By the time you stare at a mountain of artificial limbs and medical corsets, you understand these exhibits are relics of unsainted martyrs, banal fragments of terminated ordinary lives.
A sign on the way into the concentration camp requests that no photographs be taken. But a camera flashes: a mound of human hair the size of several living rooms is turned into a digital image.
It is easy to be annoyed at the insensitivity of people using phones and digital cameras to capture these objects. It seems disrespectful as sitting rooms across Europe today unwittingly have items of furniture - sofas, for example - where haircloth made from gassed humans was used.
Auschwitz II (Birkenhau) is about two miles away. A drive around its perimeter gives an idea of its terrifying size. Atrocity has both scale and degree.
The rusty barbed wire corrals off what might have been a campus, an airport, an industrial estate. The train tracks stop at the far end - close to two dynamited gas chambers. The ruins are the result of an attempt to destroy proof as perpetrators retreated. Two little lakes are frozen over, their water still grey today from the human ashes thrown into them from the crematorium.
Light snow falls. Fog billows everywhere. There are some 150 huts still standing, most brick, some wood. Go inside and they are dank, musty, dark, like outhouses for animals, with rows of triple-level bunks - on each shelf eight people slept.
This was where the lucky ones lived in a factory for killing, a production line of death.But there is a disturbing peacefulness. The snow decorates this scene of mass murder. Up to 1.5 million people were killed here. Others were worked to death. The earth screams, but silently, clinging on grimly to its dignity.
It is hard to avoid the fleeting thought that the Auschwitz death camp is a bygone age preserved: for a second, it sits in your mind as ancient and as removed from us as the chariot ways and ruins of Pompeii. And that just 20 years before you were born, this death factory was hitting peak production; achieving murder levels of 20,000 people a day; stockpiling all those shoes and suitcases; harvesting all those hairbrushes and unconvincing artificial limbs.
As you walk around this vast death field, the snow turns to sludge and you are grateful for your boots and warm clothes. You have no idea of what it must have been like to sleep in those huts, to wear little more than pyjamas and to toil hard while starving, while mourning for your entire family and while suffering a new form of hell on earth.
The day after the visit to the camp, your shoes and trousers are caked in mud. As you brush it off, it occurs to you that it must bear heavy traces of organic waste, of death sown into the soil.
In Auschwitz I, one of the buildings has a corridor lined with hundreds of framed head-and-shoulders photos, each of a man or woman in concentration camp clothing. Their locks are shorn; they are staring out at unknown future observers. They live forever, along with the atrocity.
Photographs of Auschwitz should be taken over and over. The mound of spectacles, the walking canes, the artificial hands: these images should be printed, e-mailed and sent by mobile phone. They should appear in newspapers, websites and books.
Lest - despite Rwanda, the Balkans, the Congo, Chechnya and far too many other occasions of human horror - we forget that people like you and me are capable of murdering people like you and me.
John Fleming is an Irish Times journalist