This is how we reach the former Block 4-a. A dark entrance. Only the glare of suppressed red lights in the depth. I walk inside and I stop in shock. The cellars of this block reflect the whole vastness of crime committed in Auschwitz. Individual niches hold symbols of all the layers of the society that found their death here. There are peasant threadbare coats next to Highlander garb. Robes of the clergy of all confessions. Children’s slippers in one of them speak for themselves, while the hair of murdered women next to them inspires horror. For a long time, we can’t leave this Sanctuary of Martyrdom—touched to the core.

One of the pavilions of the State Museum … in Oświęcim is devoted to the martyrdom of Jews. … The main element of the pavilion is a sarcophagus symbolising the martyrdom of Jews. Set on it is a menorah, and a dove symbolising the souls of the martyrs’ hovers over it. There are Jewish ornaments on both sides of the composition, and inscription yizkor above it.

The fourth block was designed as the Jewish pavilion. One a half million Jews died in Auschwitz. A huge map shows which countries they were brought to Poland from. The other one is the map of Auschwitz. One side of the room is taken by a mausoleum with a historical menorah symbolising the millions of graves. Today, those memorials are covered with wreaths. … In a side room we see plaster models of the crematoria. … Colossal glass urns with hair are situated upstairs. There are two tons of hair. … It was really hard to look at all that, with your eyes dry, especially when among that cloud of hair you could clearly see the soft white locks that must have belonged to children. The other exhibits are photographs and drawings illustrating life in the camp and the technique of German cruelty.

The designers and organisers of the Museum of Martyrdom rejected the easier path: of displaying the bare macabre that held sway over the camp for years. … That is the path of portraying facts, using for example wax figures, presenting whipping, pillories, bunker, executions by shooting and hanging, and even those suffocating in the gas chamber, and people dried up to skeletons. That, however, would have been against the assumption and the dignity of such a museum. A more difficult path was selected and required the collaboration of the visitor’s imagination. The path of meticulous documentation, statistical graphic charts, maps portraying the German plans concerning the expansion of the camp, and the exhibited dead objects that remain the only trace of living creatures. When in turn … we enter blocks 5 and 6 … providing the core of the collection … we stop dazzled, even though it is a shock we were prepared for. These rooms are the domain of an artist painter Tadeusz Myszkowski, one of the quiet and generous people working here. He has gone through an incredibly long, five-year’s term in the camp. … In the rooms, the bright light of the day is muffled with muslin curtains on the windows, the walls are of pigeon-grey colour, and the concrete posts supporting the ceiling were painted black, providing a perfect background for the mood, and toning down the collection placed within.

The Museum has no captions or commentaries. This silence carries the most profound message. Facts speak for themselves. What are captions good for? On average, every toothbrush, every pair of shoes is one human life extinguished here. And there are heaps of them. Realism and discretion in the solutions applied in these incredible Museum halls that contain such a particular collection command the greatest accolade.

The exhibits gathered in the rooms of the museum-in-development dispirit the visitor and transport his psyche into the world of uncanny nightmare that was reality here for years. But this is not yet the essence. It is only a week reflection of that world, we are only beginning to understand anything, we are beginning to feel our way into it. A suggestion of that world only hardly begins to set in. The gates of that reality don’t open until Birkenau, where we’re looking down from the height of the guard tower at the city of barracks and a forest of chimneys remaining from the barracks that have been liquidated; and remain open when we walk the straight streets of these huge camps that are already covered with the soft carpet of grass, with the dancing heads of camomile, so peacefully blossoming here in great numbers.

In Birkenau … there stand barracks, sombre and inhuman. We take in the huge space of Birkenau from the guard tower over the entrance gate. On the right-hand side on the first plane there are 40 barracks to be preserved in their entirety as a memento, further behind them there is a forest of chimneys sticking up and reaching as far as the wall of the trees—remnants of … barracks. Barracks that are undamaged, at least from the outside, stand on the left-hand side of the road: the women’s camp. They are overgrown with lush vegetation, firm grass, nettle, weeds, camomile: high, lush, and strong, as if the marshy ground here took revenge for years of being barren and trampled when it only could have been no more than wasteland under the feet of thousands of tormented people—and now it vibrates with more fertile sap. And that greenery, that unbridled power of life, spreading all around somewhat deadens the ghastliness of this barrack-limited ‘space for life’; it deadens it as long as we remain outside.

The interior of a barrack corresponds most closely to that vision of hell and impossibility of life. … Let us populate those three-level bunk beds in our imagination, one over another, one immediately next to the other, with a crowd of dirty, hungry, diseased, and louse-ridden women, and the picture we have built belongs to nightmare. …