In Europe

speaking, one can note that sixty per cent of them are to be liquidated, while forty per cent can be used for labour details … The Führer's prediction, made to them before this new world war was unleashed, is becoming horrendous reality … The ghettos vacated in the General Government are now being used to house those Jews deported from the Reich, and after a time the procedure will be repeated.
    In Auschwitz the elderflowers are blossoming. Oświeęcim, as it is called in Polish, is a normal town where lovers stroll by the river in the evening, and where the rest of the local young people hang around by the bridge, the boys bald, the girls giggling. They drink beer together from the same glass, with a straw, ‘because then you get drunk faster’. The coal cars go pounding by behind Hotel Glob. At least a dozen tourist buses are parked in front of the former camp. The cow parsley grows high among the trees and the dilapidated gravestones in the old Jewish cemetery. Yes, indeed, Auschwitz has a regular, old Jewish cemetery, with a high wall around it and dozens of names listed on either side, the peaceful dead who have slept through it all.
    ‘We survivors are not only an exiguous but also an anomalous minority: we are those who by their prevarications or abilities or good luck didnot touch bottom.’ wrote Primo Levi, one of the rare survivors of Auschwitz. ‘They are the “Muslims”, the submerged, the complete witnesses, the ones whose deposition would have a general significance. They are the rule, we are the exception.’
    Beneath wire netting on the immense parade grounds at Birkenau lie their rusty metal plates and spoons, then so precious, now apparently there for the taking. In the old barracks one can see their toothbrushes, their crutches and artificial legs, their baby clothes, their dusty locks of hair and their shoes. The suitcases bearing all those everyday names: ‘Judith van Gelder-Cohen, the Hague’, ‘Hanna Feitsma, Holland’. Three rooms full of shoes, reflecting better than anything else the faces of those who wore them: workmen's shoes, clogs, brogues, and between them an elegant summer sandal with a high cork sole and cheerful white and red leather straps.
    That, too, is part of our shame and dismay: the absolute innocence with which all those hundreds of thousands went to their death.
    The prisoners knew that what was happening in the camps was too astounding to be believed. Primo Levi writes that he and his friends in the camp were almost all plagued by a recurring nightmare: that they came home and, relieved and impassioned, told a loved one about the horrors they had experienced, but that they were not listened to. In the most cruel variation on this dream, the one they told simply turned his back and walked away.
    That nightmare has, in part, come to pass. For the rest of the world, Auschwitz has gradually become more a symbol than a reality. Yet it is all still there, right amid the factories in the industrial estate of modern-day Oświeęcim. And standing almost casually, a little further along across the tracks, is the famous gateway of Birkenau. For a moment the mind tries to make of it a school building from the 1930s, but there it stands, unmistakable and real, the building you have seen in all those films and all those photographs, the gateway with the rails running through it and the platform beside.
    The camp Auschwitz I was opened on 14 June, 1940. On that day more than 700 Poles arrived for the construction of, among other things, the crematorium. By 15 August it was ready to burn the first bodies. The oven, built by J. A. Topf & Söhne of Erfurt, had a capacity of a hundredbodies a day. At first Auschwitz served largely as a labour camp for companies including I. G. Farben and the Weichsel-Metall-Union. The larger camp, Auschwitz II, opened in 1941. Auschwitz became a labour-annexe-death camp, like Majdanek. Four dedicated extermination factories existed as well: Belzec, Sobibór, Chelmno and Treblinka. Less is known about them, however, because almost none of their prisoners survived.
    The first major shipment of Jews arrived at Auschwitz on 15 February, 1942. The ruse was arranged down to the smallest detail. To this new life one was allowed to bring enough rations for two days, a mess kit, one spoon, no knives, two blankets, warm clothes, a pair of work shoes and a suitcase with personal belongings, with one's name written on it. And most people fell for it: the