During our visit to Auschwitz, an elderly Jewish man accompanied our group through the site. I do not know how his presence with our group had been arranged. At the time,
I thought of him simply as the man guiding us through what we were seeing.
Inside the museum, I moved slowly from room to room, looking at objects: shoes, suitcases, hair. Things that once belonged to people. Now they stood behind glass, silent, arranged, almost ordinary.
At some point, I learned that the hair had been used to make everyday items.
That stayed with me.
It wasn’t only the loss. It was the transformation. The quiet way something human could become something usable. Something stripped of its story.
I remember watching other visitors as they moved through the space. Some leaned closer to the glass, reading quietly. Others stepped back, as if distance could make it easier. No one stayed for long. We kept moving, as if something in us could not bear to stop.
At one point, I caught my reflection in the glass, faint and out of focus, layered over the objects behind it. For a moment, it felt like
I didn’t belong to the present, but neither to that past. Just a visitor passing through something that could not be entered or understood.
I tried to imagine the lives behind the objects, but the attempt failed. There were too many. Too much. My mind could not hold them.
I remember the moment I started crying. It came suddenly, without warning, as if something inside me had reached a limit.
I stepped aside, not wanting to be seen, though I don’t think anyone was paying attention. Everyone there seemed to be carrying something invisible.
I walked past the crematorium. I won’t describe it. Not because there is nothing to say, but because whatever I say would be smaller than what it is.
Some experiences don’t stay with you.
They exceed you.
As I moved through Auschwitz, a thought kept returning to me.
How far can a human being fall?
I thought about animals. We sometimes describe extreme human cruelty as “animalistic,” but standing there, the comparison seemed unfair to animals. Animals kill out of necessity—for food, for survival. What I was confronting was something else: human beings deliberately humiliating, torturing and destroying other human beings. Cruelty turned into a system.
And still, I had not reached the moment from that day that would remain most deeply with me.
The visit ended.
We passed beyond the fences of Auschwitz and were waiting to board the bus. I was already overwhelmed by everything I had seen, smelled and felt inside the camp.
Then the man who had accompanied us told us something he had left until the end.
He told us he was an Auschwitz survivor.
For hours, this elderly Jewish man had walked with us through those spaces. I had listened as he spoke to our group. Now I understood that he had not simply studied this history or learned it from other people.
He had lived it.
He told us that, as a prisoner, he had been made to wash with soap that he understood to have been made from human fat.
I looked at the man standing before me differently.
I felt horror at what he had just told us, but also something harder to describe—a strange sense of admiration.
I had spent only a few hours inside Auschwitz and felt as though I could barely carry what
I had seen. This man had carried the memory of what he had lived there for most of his life.
And he had chosen to return.
He told us that he wanted to help ensure that what had happened there would not be forgotten.
That stayed in my memory and in my heart.
Even now, when someone tells me they are planning a trip to Poland, I hesitate. There is
a part of me that believes people should see Auschwitz.
And yet I almost always say, “If you can… don’t go.”
Not because we shouldn’t remember.
But because I know what it means to stand there and realize you cannot hold what you are seeing.
That night, back at the hotel, I noticed a small bar of soap in the bathroom.
I thought of the man who had accompanied our group.
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