This past spring, my wife and I traveled to the Czech Republic to visit our younger son. Jeffrey had been studying in Prague, pursuing his landscape architecture degree with NC State. We spent a few days in that city, and then the three of us rented a car and headed out for southern Poland. We planned to spend several days in Crakow, and then drive the hour or so to Auschwitz.

I have never visited eastern Europe, and have never visited any of the Nazi death camps. Auschwitz may be the best known of all of these camps, of which there were many. It certainly is the best preserved, with the Polish government operating an efficient and informative visitor's center. Most of the other concentration camps were destroyed by the fleeing German Army, and are identified only by a marker or plaque. Auschwitz retains its barracks, barbed wire, and guard posts, and provides an opportunity to walk in the midst of its heinous history.

Before we left for Europe, I made it a point to do some reading about this camp, in order to gain as much as I could from this experience. I had no illusion that I would somehow come to an understanding of how this aberration of humanity happened, but I wanted to know more about what transpired in this place. My reading led me to many sources. I listened to the voices of a worker in the crematorium, a Jewish doctor who worked under the supervision of Joseph Mengele, a woman describing her experiences and struggles for survival, an Italian Jew's fascinating philosophical dissection of his year in this inferno, and the fantastical ramblings of the Nazi commander of this camp. I learned about the development of the prison, and the construction of its extension, the Birkenau compound. I had not known that Auschwitz I existed long before the war, and had served as barracks for the Polish army. It was too small for the plans of Himmler and thus Birkenau was built. A mile or so from Auschwitz, it was designed to hold more than 100,000 people, and was to be a killing factory. The Nazis were successful in this goal, and though never finished, this was where more than one million people, most of them Jews, died. The SS, apparently no strangers to the use of irony, cleared this swampland and named the camp Birkenau, or "grove of birches".

Most people who visit Auschwitz are struck by the sparseness and somberness of the place. The barracks are crude, and walking through Block 11, the torture barracks, is indeed difficult. But a visit to Birkenau overwhelms you with the sheer size of it. It is here that you begin to comprehend the dedication which the Nazis applied to this genocidal process. And as you learn of what went on here, you wonder how any humans could treat others this way. It becomes clear that the Nazis did not view their captives as human, but only as fodder, either for their exploitation as forced labor, or for the ovens that operated day and night. As you stand and look at the ruins of these crematoria, you wonder...But there are no easy answers here. Only questions, and ghosts.

Thankfully, we are sixty years past this dreadful time in our history. And thankfully, there are no Nazis secreted away in some country, having constructed another Auschwitz, or Birkenau, or Dachau, or Buchenwald. But are we naive? Do we really believe that we have progressed beyond the point where we accord human life so little value? Are we so enlightened now that in six decades we have erased our capacity to murder and maim so indiscriminately?

Of course, the answer is obvious. We read daily of mass killings, of ongoing genocide in several parts of Africa, and not very long ago of "ethnic cleansing" in parts of eastern Europe. But those atrocities are far removed from our own country, and from our own cities and streets. Foreign, distant, somehow not quite real. We are more civilized than that. We would never consider human life as anything less than precious, or that a person could be simply blotted from existence because he or she was unwanted.

And yet, if you walk down the streets of just about any city in this country, and if you listen carefully, you will hear the muted cry of tiny babies, never to be born.