In Europe

museum there is still full of pans, buckets, washtubs, shovels, tools and other items useful for starting an orderly new life in the East.
    Dutch deportees hid letters in the cattle cars for those ‘at home’: it did not take the prisoners long to realise that it was always the same train that shuttled back and forth between Camp Westerbork and the East. A few of those letters have been preserved. One of them describes the pushing and squeezing in a packed freight car. ‘The mood is already horrible, everyone is snappish and argumentative.’ One young woman reported that the people in her freight car were in such ‘excellent spirits’ that they organised a cabaret performance on the first evening out. ‘I will always remember one song in particular, sung by a sixteen-year-old girl by the light of a little tea-warmer on the floor of the car. It was “Nederland”.’ Concerning another transport we know that a barber shaved the men, and that a teacher held a ‘fascinating lecture on Zionism, that quickly made everyone forget where we were headed’. And the letters always contain a final sentence, something along the lines of: ‘We've stopped at Auschwitz, we have to get out. It is a big factory town, with lots of smokestacks everywhere.’ Or: ‘In the distance I can see a building, all lit up. So long, my dearest, we'll be coming home soon.’
    The yard at Birkenau is now covered in daisies and clover. Swallows dip and soar above the few barracks that have been left standing, the bare red smokestacks, the groves of birch that grow on human ashes. A bird has built its nest amid the rubble of Crematorium III. Above the gate one can still see the soot from the hundreds of steam locomotives that pulled in here.
    From the diary of Auschwitz camp physician SS-Hauptsturmführer Proffessor Dr Kremer:
    31 August, 1942
    Tropical weather here at thirty-eight degrees in the shade, dust and countless flies! Excellent service in the officers’ mess. Tonight, for example, there was pickled goose liver for forty pfennigs, with stuffed tomatoes, tomato salad, etc. First inoculated against typhoid.
    1 September, 1942
    Sent off order to Berlin for officer's cap, belt and suspenders. In the afternoon, attended the gassing of a block, with Zyklon B against louse.
    6 September, 1942
    Today, Sunday, excellent lunch: tomato soup, half a chicken with potatoes and red cabbage (20g fat), sweets and lovely vanilla ice cream. After dinner welcomed the new physician, Obersturmführer Wirths, who hails from Waldbröl … This evening at 8.00 went to another
Sonderaktion
[special action] outside.
    9 September, 1942
    Early this morning received from my lawyer in Münster, Proffessor Dr Hallerman, the extremely good news that my wife and I are divorced as from the first of this month. I see colours again: a black veil has lifted from my life.
    This evening attended
Sonderaktion
(fourth time).
    10 September, 1942
    This morning to
Sonderaktion
(fifth time).
    20 September, 1942
    Today, late Sunday afternoon from 3.00 to 6.00, listened to concert by prisoners’ orchestra in lovely sunlight: orchestra leader was director of the Warsaw State Opera. Eighty musicians. At lunch, braised pork. Dinner, fried tench.
    Camp Birkenau is decaying quickly. Half a century later the rusty barbed wire crumbles in your hands, the piles of shoes are only grey and black, most of the buildings have rotted away. Only the smokestacks still rise above it all, the long rows of the remains of hundreds of barracks that once formed the camp for men and families. The inhabitants of Oświeęcim themselves are already taking steps. At the edge of Birkenau, less than a hundred metres from the camp, is a brand new architectural apartment complex. The big living-room windows look out on the brownish-green yards of the camp. The complex itself is generally referred to as ‘the museum’, and that is what it has become for many of those who live here; a sort of park that draws a great many tourists, and nothing more than that.
    I stop to talk to Adriana Warno. She is about eighteen, and has a summer job taking tickets at the gate to Birkenau. ‘We've always lived here, my parents too, and we like it,’ she says. ‘For us the museum is what the Eiffel Tower is for Parisians. The museum is down at one end, and Oświeęcim is up at the other, the two don't have much to do with each other. It's a very normal town, you know, what used to be Auschwitz. We go out and