Auschwitz
About an hour outside Krakow by bus is the Polish town of Oswiecim, the home to the largest Nazi concentration camp, Auschwitz. There are two separate camps that are now part of a museum. Auschwitz I was the first camp, converted from a Polish army barracks. There are about 30 one- and two-storey brick buildings and tall birch trees lining the straight paths through the camp. It felt completely at odds with how I expected to feel in Auschwitz. Take out the tourists and you could be in a university campus. Well, except for the message on the iron gates above the camp entrance - Arbeit Macht Frei, or Work Makes You Free.

Three kilometres away is the second, much larger camp Auschwitz II - Birkenau. The second I walked through the gates I knew exactly where I was: it's a factory. First of all, the place is vast - much bigger than the Melbourne CBD. It took me 15 minutes to walk along the railway line from the gate to the ruins of the gas chambers at the back of the camp, and the place is many times wider than it is deep. From the very middle of the camp it feels like you could pick a direction and walk there for as long as you like.

Some of the prisoners were housed in brick barracks to the left of the railway line, but most were stored in hastily-constructed wooden barracks with chimneys to the right of the railway. I had the same sense of instant recognition when I saw those wooden barracks - they were stables. As it turns out, they were designed to hold 50 horses and were used to house between 800 and 1000 prisoners. The fleeing Nazis set fire to the barracks so most are gone, but on the right there is a forest of the brick chimneys stretching off into the distance.