As today is the day chosen to commemorate the Shoah and as only last September we had visited perhaps its most infamous death factory I am republishing something I wrote during our visit.

I had been to this horrendously iconic place of Man’s inhumanity to Man some twenty-five years ago, when I passed through these parts on my motorcycle. Memory had preserved it as a bleak landmark, but memory, I realised, is mercifully selective. Yesterday it rose again in its full, brutal scale. It was the first time Sandra had seen it, and I was deeply grateful to her for coming. This is not a place one visits lightly. It is vast, exposed, and physically demanding, requiring almost four hours of steady walking—four hours during which the body tires, while the mind is steadily worn down by what it is forced to confront.
The sheer size of the site is itself part of the message. This was not a momentary lapse, not a sudden eruption of violence, but an industrial, bureaucratic enterprise sustained over years. Brick by brick, rail by rail, it was planned, staffed, supplied, and maintained. Evil here was not chaotic; it was organised.

Our guide was excellent—measured, factual, and scrupulously free of overt bias. That restraint made the visit all the more powerful. There was no need for rhetoric, no need for moralising flourishes. The facts alone, calmly laid out, were devastating. Dates, numbers, procedures, routines—each detail quietly reinforced the reality that this was a system designed to erase people methodically, efficiently, and without remorse.

Yet for all the explanations, I left with questions that remain disturbingly unresolved.
How could a nation whose own identity was forged through centuries of hardship, humiliation, and suffering come to inflict such calculated cruelty on others? How does collective memory of pain fail so completely to produce collective empathy? At what point does grievance curdle into justification, and justification into atrocity?
And how could another nation—fully aware, after Stalingrad, that the war was strategically lost—still find the resources, the energy, and the administrative will to pursue a project whose sole aim was annihilation? Trains diverted, manpower reassigned, materials rationed elsewhere—all in service of cancelling an entire people and reducing others to permanent servitude. Even measured in the cold logic of war, it was irrational. Measured morally, it was madness on a cosmic scale.

What was destroyed here was not only millions of lives, but something more fundamental: the very idea of humanity as a shared condition. To design such a place, to operate it daily, to normalise its routines, required the systematic dismantling of conscience itself. This was not merely the murder of people; it was the deliberate destruction of the right to be called human—by victims and perpetrators alike.

Walking away, one is left with the unsettling knowledge that this road was built by ordinary hands, justified by ordinary language, and travelled step by step. And that, perhaps, is the most chilling lesson of all.