3rd January 1992

Today we went to Auschwitz. I was very nervous about going, only deciding to at the last possible moment. It took slightly more than an hour to get there. The countryside was very attractive, you would never know that you were near such an infamous place. The nearer we got the more nervous I became - I am sure that I was not the only one. Ironically Boney M were singing "Hooray, hooray it is a happy holiday" on the radio as we were arriving. Some nervous laughter.

My words are not capable of describing this utterly, utterly abhorrent place. It must be the focus of the lowest point ever reached by mankind. Titanic effort, skill and organisation had gone into its design, a place only possible in this century, perversely (or maybe not so perversely) the developments of the industrial revolution turned towards maximum efficiency in its product: death. It looks like a vast factory, in a real sense it can be considered one. This mechanical rationality is part of the horror. The map of Birkenau resembles a circuit board. In the museum you see estimates from German companies bidding for the contract for the crematoriums; these are written in the language of sales talk, proudly writing how many bodies can be burnt in an hour and working out costs and savings, company brochures of death and disposal.

It has been left almost exactly as the Russians found it, a certain amount was destroyed by the panicking SS attempting to hide what had happened, but you get a good idea of what it was like. Thick concrete posts carrying rusted barbed wire curl in everywhere, large transistors on these posts show that the barbed wire was electrified. The cynical slogan "Work Makes Free" still curves over the entrance to Auschwitz 1, rendered in an almost twee metallic style. It could be the entrance to a park. Once the Auschwitz band played as work parties marched out under this lie.

First we went to the museum housed in Auschwitz 1.

Here you absorb the macabre details. There are huge piles of hairbrushes, suitcases, human hair (removed to make rope, and apparently socks for the men on the U-boats), shaving brushes, artificial limbs, glasses,... the list goes on and on. I found these particularly poignant as they were all personal, and there were so many of them, heaped in huge piles, each one signifying an individual, an individual life. These were just the remnants of what the Russians found, the huge warehouses, strangely called Canada 1 and 2, where the SS stored their stolen goods, were set alight by the panicking Nazis.

In each building there were rows and rows of photographs of victims' faces, and yet these were the people who survived for a while: the vast majority of people were killed on arrival and there are no records of them. Some of the frames were adorned with recently-cut flowers, put there I presume by relatives on an awful pilgrimage.

There were extraordinary bathrooms decorated with blue friezes showing little Aryan boys and girls at the seaside. They looked like they belonged in a nursery school. They were very out of place. Who were they meant for? There were no children in this camp. The children coming in on the trains went straight to the gas chambers, they were not useful for labour. I find it hard to believe they were meant for the prisoners. I think they were the bathrooms of the block supervisors, prisoners themselves, but with certain privileges. These men were not political prisoners. They were apparently awful sadists; they bullied and policed the others, sustained by food that they did not have. The SS could count on them to maintain control.

The full horror of the place hits you when you drive the 3kms to Birkenau. Auschwitz 1 is really quite small, but Birkenau is vast, and the details you have just absorbed have to be multiplied a hundred fold. We stood on the tower at the entrance and I, for one, was staggered by its size. Acres and acres, neat and methodically arranged, rows and rows of huge huts stretching away into the distance. We walked down the railway siding to the monument to the victims of fascism and it must have taken around 25 minutes. This was the siding where the 'selection' was made, it was the longest railway siding that I have ever seen.

The remains of the gas chambers are by the monument . There is little left, the SS bulldozed them in. Höss, the planner and Kommandant of Auschwitz, boasted that at their peak they were killing 60,000 people a day, talking of the inefficiency of the other death camps. If this is true it defies comprehension. At his trial he revelled in details of what they had been doing. He spoke this damning information with pride. He was convicted of mass genocide and hanged at Auschwitz 1 facing the camp. You can still see his gallows. One hopes that his dreadful objectivity became a horrifying subjectivity, but it probably did not. He went to his death never admitting he was wrong.

I find it hard to put myself in the minds of the SS running the camp. I cannot see how you can become so utterly desensitised to what you are doing. When you look at the photographs of SS men taking victims from the trains, and you strain to see some visible sign of evil on their faces, some clue to their thought processes, you can see nothing. They look very ordinary. There are fat men, who look like they might enjoy beer and songs with comrades, a pimple-faced youth straining through his glasses, waving a machine gun at a young mother with a child, no doubt about to consign them to the chambers. These are men with families who gave the clothes of the children they murdered to their own offspring (they had first choice in the booty) and made cloth from the hair of their mothers. These were men whom one assumes had no qualms about what they were doing, seemingly no moral dilemma, and yet they exterminated millions of people, each with their assorted baggage of emotions, desires, hopes and fears, millions of ordinary people with whom they had no contact with except at the moment of death. The only way I understand it is that they saw their victims in the same way that carnivores regard the animals that they make meals from. They cannot have seen them as human at all.

What happened in Germany in the 1930s? How was it so easy for this mass psychosis to have occurred in Europe in the twentieth century? Or is the mass psychosis simply a component, be it a derailed one, of the process that resulted also in industrialisation? Auschitwz is a terrifying place, a real heart of darkness hidden in its centre. It is a place where compassion died. Having been there, there are few emotions more important than compassion. I was very glad to leave Birkenau. I do not think that I will return.