We stood in half a foot of fresh snow as we looked across the waste and terror of Birkenau. How grave this grave. We were lucky I think. The blank Polish sky warmed up to almost-freezing and laid a new blanket of white across the legacy of horror. It was reverent, clean, and peaceful. It almost seemed unfair.

My daughter reminded me that it would be green in any easier season. It might look pretty, verdant, life-affirming: a green field dotted with crumbling brick chimneys from the ruined barracks; the cratered ovens memorializing a peculiar race of subhuman supermen who could decide to erase a people—and almost succeed.

Most tourists don’t come in January, for good reason. There are clumps of people, young and old. They are quiet, helping one another, earnestly clambering through the thick snow, careful not to slip on this unforgiving earth, and the vast expanse—a stretch of snowy wilderness we would avoid in town.  But who can complain in Birkenau?  If my coat’s a bit thin, if a bit of moisture comes through the toe of my boot, if the wind stings my eyes, how can I complain about such minor matters in the shadow of the guard tower of death?

I clutch a return ticket in my pocket. Gray cabdrivers await the 15 Zloty return fare and I press against the watch on my arm. I’m seized with the realization that we must make the 3:36 train back to Krakow. There’s little light left in this bleak Polish winter sky and we must be out of here before dark.

So this is Birkenau.

I didn’t hear the reciprocal phrase in my head at Auschwitz. We were fresher then—a few hours ago when we were dropped at the museum door, warm, self-possessed. Now the chill of vast field of Birkenau has numbed each fiber.

I sense the terrible times recounted by Primo Levi in Survival at Auschwitz. I pressed the book mark in at the beginning of his second winter. Here were the cold and snow that he dreaded.

My heart is full of his youth, his stories of theft, bravery, and adjustment to inhuman conditions, fear and barbarism.

I’d been bracing myself for this day of the trip. I’d summonsed mental and physical strength. I’d set aside my warmest socks.

My daughter dared to mention—it almost looks nice: the richly colored brick buildings in such perfect rows; the wrought iron gate the blanket of snow; the cold cleansing air.  It could be a trip around an army barrack or old company town.  But inside each building there is an exhibit of some small thing that reveals the horrors created here.

Of course there is no understanding Auschwitz and Birkenau—that is the point.  That is what saves us as we push inside the taxi that is what drives us along the corridors so we can get out before dark.  If you could contain Auschwitz, if you could grasp it, understand it, perhaps you would become a part of it.  It is permissible to leave portions unread, moments uncontemplated.

The archivists know this.  They know that a glimpse into the storehouses of plunder and evil says more than more numbers and maps and orders and carloads.  Each Holocaust site has its pile of shoes.  Only here there are also cases of human hair, baby clothes, spectacles, shaving brushes and prosthetic limbs.  How many of these arms and legs were gifts from the Kaiser and the Empire to loyal soldiers just a couple of decades before they were stolen here at Auschwitz?

It is the luggage that has the most impact for me. Leather bags with conscientious tags: Ernest Rosenthal, Levi Bloch, addresses in Hungary, Poland, and Yugoslavia. These bags were carefully packed for their last journey, filled with only the most important or useful things for resettlement. Resettlement—that would have been an awful enough fate. But the truth was too wicked for the owner to have contemplated.

So this is Poland, this is Europe, this was the Twentieth Century.  I know “never forget.”  I must learn “don’t always remember” and find a peace here, while sloughing this terrible scar tissue from the future.