A view from Auschwitz

It's hard to find the words to write about this place. Every syllable seems unworthy; too light, too insignificant.

It's a beautiful day. The giant green chestnut trees are bathed in sunlight, and a few buttery clouds float in a startling blue sky. The idyllic backdrop gives the squat red-brick buildings an almost quaint feel. They look like old warehouses or bakeries. But the electric barbed wire and the infamous "Arbeit Macht Frei" arch points to the horrors within.

I thought that seeing Auschwitz would help me comprehend one of the 20th centuries greatest tragedies. But its hard to fathom the scale of the Nazi's brutality: more than 1.5m people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau. At its worst, the gas chambers could murder upwards of 10,000 men, women, and children a day. Life expectancy for inmates was 3 months for women, 6 months for men.

Almost more shocking to me was the Nazi's systematic, almost factory-like approach to killing. Death factory is really more accurate than death camp. In this factory people were the inputs and absolutely nothing was wasted: people were shorn of all hair to produce "hair cloth", shoes were sorted and shipped to civilians in Germany, and gold fillings were even pulled out of their mouthes after they'd been gassed and used to fund the Nazi war machine.

The total and utter perversion of norms and morals is astounding. How could the Nazis create a culture in which such terrible savagry was not considered abnormal? Where people lived in such fear that they simply complied and condoned it? Many philosophers and historians have asked this question. I'm not sure there is a good answer.

At one of the prisoner's sheds in Birkenau there was a wreath laid at the foot of the internal fireplace. "For all those who have suffered at the hands of of evil" it read. But I thought this was perhaps wide of the mark. If anything, Auschwitz stands to remind us what we are all capable of such evil. Perhaps "for those who have suffered at the hands of others" would have been more fitting, for it is up to each and everyone of us to protection us from ourselves.