Our recent European vacation included a visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau, for me a profoundly disturbing, thought-provoking,and life-changing experience. It’s a hard story to tell, and you may want to just stop reading here.

The tour began in Auschwitz, which was a former Polish military facility until the Nazis took it over and turned it into a concentration camp. The old brick barracks are now a museum containing photos and artifacts, which our guide interpreted for us.

As we passed from one building to another I felt a growing sense of horror and revulsion — the searing images, the huge display cases of shoes, clothing and luggage — the place just reeks of gratuitous cruelty and soulless evil. We walked through a reconstruction of the original killing facility, actually passing through the original gas chamber and crematorium. Our guide instructed us to maintain silence here and not take photos out of respect for the dead.

The guide related to us how as the Reich tightened its grip on occupied countries and the volume of people rounded up and sent to the camps increased, the capacity of the original Auschwitz became insufficient. This led to the construction of Birkenau about a kilometer away.

What I saw at Auschwitz was gut-wrenching and horrific, but Birkenau was far worse. Here was the famous railroad platform where Jews, Roma people and others were unloaded from boxcars and sorted into those who would be worked to death and those who would go straight to the gas chambers. Here were the industrial-sized gas chambers and crematoria capable of “processing” thousands of people per day.

While they are in ruins now — our guide explained that the Nazis blew them up as the Allied armies moved in — the foundations and ruins still exist. She explained how they worked: Prisoners were first put in a “changing room” with numbered hooks, told they were about to be treated for lice, and to remember the hook where they left their clothing so they could retrieve it afterward. They were then herded into the gas chambers, where the killing process took 20-30 minutes. The bodies were then moved to a processing room where hair, gold teeth, etc. were removed, and finally to the crematoria. The ashes were spread on the grounds, and our guide explained that we were literally walking on a cemetery containing the remains of hundreds of thousands of souls.

For me, the whole experience was intensely disturbing and thought-provoking. How could human beings do such a thing? What could possibly set in motion the thought and effort that went into conceiving of, building and operating such a facility? Are there evil seeds hiding in the souls of each of us that given the right conditions can grow and lead to such a thing as this? What moves us to turn on our fellow human beings, see them as “the other,” and put us on the slippery slope that leads to ovens of Auschwitz?

Are there answers to these questions? I really don’t know, and that in itself is chilling. Seeing this changed me forever.

— By Larry Vogel

Larry Vogel is a reporter for the My Neighborhood News Network. He lives in Edmonds.