Living with the silence of Auschwitz

One of the books that struck me early among my father’s collection was a small, grey one with the title, Dying We Live. As a young adult trying to read, I was drawn to the book by the irony in the title—how could someone live by dying?

Once I began to read it, I was touched. They were the last messages of Jews awaiting execution at the concentration camp at Auschwitz.

My heart ached.

And, I remembered the black-and-white photographs of skeletal men with eyes sunk in deep sockets and bones sticking out in Winston Churchill’s series on World War II. It had haunted me for days in my boyhood.

I imaged the horror though I was too young to fully understand the depth of human suffering.

I never thought I would be visiting Auschwitz. On my second visit to Poland last year, I made up my mind to go. I took the hour-long journey by train from Krakow. The bogey I was in was empty but for a paltry number of tourists. The elderly man who sat next to me smiled, and I reciprocated. He asked if I was going to Oświęcim, the German name of Auschwitz. When I said I was, he shook his head gently and looked out. I was not able to understand what he meant.

The morning mist clung to the Polish countryside as the bus I got on from the railway station wound through the quiet streets of Oświęcim, a town whose German name—Auschwitz—had become synonymous with humanity’s darkest hour. I pressed my face to the window, watching ordinary life unfold: children walking to school, elderly men feeding pigeons, shopkeepers arranging their wares. The banality of it all seemed almost surreal, knowing what lay just beyond these residential streets.

The group of men and women who also got on the bus from the railway station was boisterous. They talked loud and laughed louder. They were enjoying their holidays. I looked out, trying to remember some lines from Dying We Live, and wondered where the book was. It must be in the bookshelf at my mother’s place. I must pick it up and read again, I decided as the bus stopped. We all filed out.

The entrance to Auschwitz appeared suddenly, marked by the infamous wrought-iron gate bearing the words “Arbeit macht frei”—work makes you free. As I passed beneath those letters, I felt the weight of Austrian psychiatrist and Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl’s words from Man’s Search for Meaning: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances.”

The gate’s cynical promise seemed to mock that very freedom.

The Blocks: Architecture of Dehumanisation

The red brick blocks stretched before me in orderly rows, their mundane appearance belying their horrific purpose. Block 4 housed the first exhibition, and stepping inside felt like entering a tomb. The narrow corridors, originally designed as stables for the Austrian army, had been converted into barracks where hundreds of prisoners were crammed into spaces meant for dozens.

In the first room, behind glass cases, lay mounds of human hair—two tons of it, ranging from blonde to black, some still bearing traces of the blue-grey disinfectant Zyklon B. The hair had been collected to be woven into cloth for the German war effort. I found myself thinking of Primo Levi’s observation in If This Is a Man: “Sooner or later in life everyone discovers that perfect happiness is unrealisable, but there are few who pause to consider the antithesis: that perfect unhappiness is equally unattainable.”

The adjacent room contained suitcases, each carefully labelled with names, addresses, and transport numbers. “Hinde Sara Wolf, Berlin,” read one; “Franz Wohlfahrt, Wien,” another. These were not just possessions but final testimonies to lives that had been systematically erased. The victims had been told they were being “resettled,” a euphemism that allowed them to pack their most precious belongings, never knowing they were packing for their deaths.

Block 5 displayed the systematic documentation of destruction. Photographs lined the walls—thousands of them—showing the faces of prisoners, their heads shaved, their eyes holding expressions that ranged from defiance to despair to hollow resignation. The photos were arranged chronologically, documenting the physical deterioration of the human body under the camp’s conditions. As Hannah Arendt wrote in The Origins of Totalitarianism, “The ideal condition for mob rule is not the dictatorship of one man, but the ideal condition for totalitarian rule is to make human beings superfluous.”

We live in a world were more and more human beings are being made superfluous. They are not needed in the mainstream. They have been marginalised, if not gagged into silence. They are mere jetsam and flotsam.

The Instruments of Murder

Block 6 housed perhaps the most disturbing exhibit: the canisters of Zyklon B, the pesticide that had been perverted into an instrument of mass murder. The green-blue crystals had originally been developed to save lives by killing disease-carrying insects. Now they stood as testimony to how easily science could be twisted towards evil ends. The irony was not lost on me that a substance meant to preserve life had been used to extinguish it on an industrial scale. ‘Pest control’—I couldn’t help thinking of the pun. There could be no better instrument of mass murder under ethnic cleansing than a ‘pest control’.

Outside, the dry wind carried the scent of decomposing leaves, and I was struck by how the seasons continued their eternal cycle in this place where time had seemed to stop. The trees that now spread shade had witnessed unspeakable horrors, their roots perhaps drawing nutrients from soil that had been saturated with human ash.

The Wall of Death

Behind Block 11, I found the black wall where thousands of prisoners had been executed. The wall was pockmarked with bullet holes, and flowers lay scattered at its base—roses, chrysanthemums, and simple wildflowers left by visitors from around the world. The silence here was profound, broken only by the sound of my own breathing and the distant murmur of other visitors.

I found myself drawn to a photograph of a young woman, perhaps twenty years old, her eyes still holding a spark of life despite the brutality she had endured. What had she been thinking about when this picture was taken? A lover left behind? A family she would never see again? The future that was being stolen from her hour by hour?

A young girl, perhaps twelve years old, approached the wall with her parents. She placed a single white rose at its base and whispered something in what sounded like Hebrew. Her parents stood behind her, their faces etched with grief that seemed to transcend generations. In that moment, I understood that Auschwitz was not just a historical site but a living wound, where the past and present gnawed at with equal measure.

Standing before that wall, I recalled Elie Wiesel’s searing words from Night: “Never shall I forget that night, the first night in camp, which has turned my life into one long night, seven times cursed and seven times sealed.” The wall seemed to embody that darkness, a place where night had fallen and never lifted. Elie Wiesel writes in Night that he was asked to roll up his left sleeve. Numbers were tattooed on his left arm. “I became A-7713. From then on, I had no other name.”

Human cruelty has no age. It predates all our civilisations. The cruelty of man is not bestial—no animal kills for fun. The cruelty of man is the shadow of himself or the alter-man we all carry within us.

Ellie Wiesel also writers about how hunger overwhelmed everything else in the camp. “”I was nothing but a body. Perhaps even less: a famished stomach. The stomach alone was measuring time.”

I walked on.
None of talked. The commentary of the ‘tour guide’ boomed in the earpiece.
I walked on.

I walked slowly, feeling the weight of history pressing down on me like a physical force. Every step was a prayer, every breath an act of witness. The gravel crunched beneath my feet with a sound like breaking bones, and I found myself thinking of the prisoners who had walked these paths—some to work details, some to medical experiments, some to their deaths.

 The Crematorium

The walk to Crematorium I felt interminable, though it was perhaps only a few hundred metres. The building appeared unremarkable from the outside—a simple brick structure that could have been a workshop or warehouse. But stepping inside, I entered the antechamber of hell.

The room was low-ceilinged and windowless, with fake shower heads protruding from the ceiling. This was where hundreds of people had been crowded together, told they were about to receive a shower after their long journey. The deception was complete—there were even benches where victims could sit while undressing, and numbered hooks where they could hang their clothes.

The adjacent room contained the ovens, their iron doors standing open like hungry mouths. The floor was worn smooth by countless feet, and the walls were stained with soot. A sign in multiple languages explained the process: how bodies were burned, how gold teeth were extracted, how the ash was ground and scattered. The bureaucratic precision of it all was perhaps more chilling than the violence itself.

The Children’s Barracks

Block 20 had been designated for children, and walking through it, I felt the weight of interrupted childhoods. Drawings covered the walls—crude sketches of houses, families, and dreams that would never be completed. One drawing showed a child’s hand reaching towards a butterfly, and I thought of the poem ‘Butterfly’ by Pavel Friedmann, written in Theresienstadt:

“The last, the very last,
so richly, brightly,
dazzlingly yellow—
perhaps if the sun’s tears would sing against a white stone…”

Friedmann, who was shifted to Auschwitz in 1944, was killed.

In the corner stood a small wooden shoe, no bigger than my fist. It was impossible to look at it without thinking of the child who had worn it, who had perhaps played games and asked questions and laughed at simple jokes. The shoe seemed to hold within it all the innocence that had been systematically destroyed in this place.

The visitors were taken into the buildings in batches. By the time, our batch came out, people were laden with emotions. The group which had been noisy and boisterous in the bus had fallen silent. They didn’t speak to each other.

The Ride to Birkenau

The bus ride to Auschwitz II-Birkenau was brief but felt like a journey into an even deeper circle of hell. As we approached the camp, the railway tracks came into view—the same tracks that had delivered over a million people to their deaths. The tracks terminated at a ramp where SS officers had conducted their ‘selections,’ sending some to the right towards temporary survival, others to the left towards immediate death.

The sheer scale of Birkenau was overwhelming. Where Auschwitz I had been a converted army barracks, Birkenau had been purpose-built for extermination. The site stretched to the horizon, with the ruins of barracks and crematoria scattered across a landscape that seemed to absorb sound and light.

The Ramp

Standing on the selection ramp, I tried to imagine the scene that had played out here countless times: the cattle cars disgorging their human cargo, the confusion and fear of the arrivals, the barked orders in German, the arbitrary gestures that determined who would live and who would die. Josef had, who was often dubbed ‘angel of death’, often conducted these selections himself, whistling classical music while deciding the fate of thousands.

The ramp was now covered with gravel, but I could still make out the indentations where the train tracks had run. Weeds grew between the stones. There was something about the persistent growth of these wild plants that seemed to speak of life’s stubborn refusal to be completely extinguished.

The Ruins of Crematoria

The ruins of Crematoria II and III stood like broken teeth against the sky. The SS had attempted to destroy the evidence of their crimes before fleeing, but the concrete foundations and twisted metal remained as testimony. Walking among the ruins, I could see the underground chambers where victims had been told to undress, the narrow staircases they had descended, the massive ovens that had burned day and night.

The crematoria had been designed with industrial efficiency in mind. Each could dispose of thousands of bodies per day, and the ashes were used as fertiliser or dumped in nearby rivers. The bureaucratic language of the Nazi documents—referring to ‘processing capacity’ and ‘throughput’—revealed how completely the victims had been reduced to units in a production system.

The Pond of Ashes

Behind the ruins lay a small pond, its surface dark and still. This was where tons of human ash had been dumped, creating a monument more terrible than any sculpture. The water was surrounded by reeds and cattails, and occasionally a bird would land on the surface, causing ripples to spread outward in concentric circles.

I thought of the Jewish custom of placing stones on graves as a sign of remembrance, and I picked up a small pebble from the path. I placed it at the water’s edge, like the ‘stones of Gilgal.’

A Warning

The visit concluded at the International Monument, a stark concrete structure bearing inscriptions in multiple languages. The monument was simple, almost austere, but its very plainness seemed appropriate. Any attempt at beauty or grandeur would have been obscene in this place.

As I stood reading the inscriptions—“Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity”—I realised that Auschwitz was not just a museum but a sacred site. It was a place where the worst of human nature had been revealed, but also where the best had sometimes shone through. I thought of the prisoners who had shared their meagre rations, who had risked their lives to help others, who had maintained their humanity in the face of systematic dehumanisation.

The train journey back to Kraków was in silence. No one spoke, perhaps because words were important to express what we had witnessed. The Polish countryside rolled past—the same fields and forests that had witnessed the deportation trains, the same sky that had been darkened by the smoke from the crematoria.

As we returned to the world of the living, I carried with me the faces from the photographs, the silence of the gas chambers, the weight of the children’s shoes. These were not just historical artefacts but sacred relics, demanding that we bear witness to what had happened and ensure that it never happens again.

In my room that evening, I opened Night again and read Wiesel’s words: “For the survivor who chooses to testify, it is clear: his duty is to bear witness for the dead and for the living. He has no right to deprive future generations of a past that belongs to our collective memory.”

The visit to Auschwitz had been many things—horrifying, heartbreaking, transformative—but above all, it had been a confrontation with the fundamental questions of human existence. In a place where evil had seemed to triumph completely, the act of remembrance itself became a form of resistance, a refusal to let darkness have the final word.

As I write this now, months later, I find that Auschwitz has become a permanent resident of my consciousness. It is not a place I visited but a place that visited me, leaving its mark on my being. And perhaps that is as it should be. The dead of Auschwitz deserve nothing less than our permanent remembrance, our vigilant witness, our solemn promise that their suffering will not be forgotten or repeated.

The last entry in the guest book at Auschwitz, written by a child, read simply: “Why?” It is a question that has no answer, and perhaps that is the point. Some questions are meant to be lived with rather than solved, to be carried as a burden and a responsibility. The question “Why?” becomes a prayer, a demand, a commitment to build a world where such questions need never be asked again.

I must look for the book, ‘Dying We Live’ when I visit my mother next time.

AuschwitzconsciousnessGermanyNazisresidentvisitedWorld War II