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The cat scampered along the side of the ditch, its coat shiny black from the morning rain. I followed, stumbling over mounds of weeds and sinking my shoes into spongy mud. Every few metres the cat stopped and twisted its head around, focussing its yellow eyes on me, checking to see if I was still in pursuit. It ducked under the barbed wire, once electric, and sashayed across the ruins of crematorium III. Seeing me stuck at the fence, the cat’s ears lowered and it sat there staring at me, smirking. ‘Is that you, Hoess?’ I asked quietly. ‘Have you trapped me like you trapped a million others?’

Unfair to the cat of course, but there was something sinister about a black cat stalking the grounds of Birkenau concentration camp, Auschwitz II. Satisfied it had cornered me, the cat strutted across the field of ruins and settled under the shelter of one of the wooden observation towers, the old commandant surveying what remained of his domain.

Auschwitz. What can you say that hasn’t already been said? Journey 75km west of Krakow and you will learn just how extreme and vile the hate of humankind can be. There is nothing uplifting here, no tales of heroic resistance, of individual sacrifice to save others; there are only fences and towers, barracks and blocks, chambers and crematoria. It is such an important place, but I worry that it does not get the necessary emotional response from visitors.

That is by no means the fault of the museum and the caretakers. Auschwitz is devastating, but I spent an entire day ‘interned’ in the camp, watching the groups flood in, trying to gauge their collective response and, rather cynically, prove once more that when we are removed from history, by time or nationality, it has a limited affect on us.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex is made up of four camps, but only two are visited. To be more precise, Auschwitz gets the most visitors; Birkenau, a much more distressing experience because of its overwhelming size, is less frequented. It is that lack of tourists, and the resulting solitary feeling one has walking around, that etches the Birkenau experience into your mind.

But few visitors to Auschwitz get that feeling. For most, it seems, there is a rush to get inside, see the mounds of suitcases, the puzzle of entangled spectacles, the rolls of cloth made of human hair, take a few photographs and then rush back out again. The tourist buses jam the car park like baguettes in a French baker’s window. They sport number plates from all over the Europe, as do the assorted cars and campervans. They have all travelled so far, but why?

The morning is grey, with intermittent drizzle causing people to constantly open and close their umbrellas. This fluttering and ruffling is my soundtrack as I sit at the Auschwitz gate, that gruesome gravestone-shaped entrance adorned with ‘Arbeit macht Frei’ (work brings freedom). Everyone gathers here, waiting patiently to have their photos taken in front, smiling, pointing. Groups come together for portraits, grinning, laughing. You can imagine these people back home, showing photos from their trips: ‘Here’s me at the Eiffel Tower, in front of the Berlin Wall, at the gate of Auschwitz, on St. Mark’s Square.’

The prisoners passed through this gate twice each day. I hope the day will not come when there will be re-enactments, with actors dressed in blue and white stripped uniforms marching through the gate every hour on the hour. Tourists could have their photos taken with an emaciated prisoner or, worse, with a strapping blond-haired SS guard. Oh, I really hope it does not come to that.

After several hours I can’t take it anymore: the shouted, banal observations, the click and buzz of digital cameras (some people used their mobile phones), the smiles, the laughter, the bizarre feeling that this place has become something attune to a roadside attraction, like the ones you find in America. The camp leaves me cold, but the visitors make me want to throw up.

I venture inside the camp, passing with a sickening shudder through the gate. Before the war, this was an abandoned Polish Barracks. The buildings are solid brick, but the place has the feel and look of a lunatic asylum, one with a difference: here, the crazy people were in charge and all the prisoners were sane.

Blocks 4, 5 and 6 are where the tourists flock. The rooms are crowded with groups, with leaders waxing loudly about the camp, trying to illicit shock from the listeners, but eventually moving aside to let cameras zoom in. These blocks give details about the camp (maps, blueprints, plans, documents, manifests – the efficiency of it all is numbing) and display samples of the masses of personal effects prisoners had brought with them.

While standing in front of the pile of hairbrushes and toothbrushes, a young man approaches me. He has a youthful face and, unsure of language, holds out his camera to me. I take it. The young man locks arms with two others and they all smile, like they are being photographed at a football game. What beautiful white teeth they have.

With the boys gone, I turn back to the toothbrushes. There’s something about them that is really disturbing me. Such an individual instrument; one does not share a toothbrush. There are piles of them, each telling a particular story of cavities, root canals and impacted wisdom teeth, but the toothbrush does not know the story’s end: gold teeth yanked out after the person was dead, melted down and added to the piles of Nazi gold.

I station myself outside this popular row of blocks, this morbid amusement arcade where all the important exhibits can be seen in a quick twenty minutes. People eye me curiously, because I stand there eyeing them cynically. Still the animated conversations, the rush-rush of tourists groups, the jingle and blare of mobile phones, and lots of shiny, healthy teeth.

A large group of middle-aged Americans pass en route to the gas chamber and crematorium I. This large group seems like two joined together, and I hear one woman remark to another, ‘After the camp, we’re hittin’ the castles near Krakow.’

And so it goes for the rest of the afternoon. More groups, more canned laughter in the face of such distressing exhibits, more itinerary discussions (classic tourist small talk), more ducking down the side of the block for a quick cigarette stubbed out against the red brick, more people shouting into their mobile phones ‘Yeah, I’m at Auschwitz’ like it’s the local supermarket.

As I leave the camp, head down, almost in tears, people look at me and see how the exhibits have affected me, how sad and angry I look. They will talk about me back home, the lone man distressed by the camp. If they only knew. I leave the car park behind and walk the 3km over to Birkenau.

The car park is small; no baguettes here. It is quiet, barren, isolated, and the atmosphere is much more sombre. The camp’s most striking feature, aside from its immense size, is the railway track cutting down the middle like a dividing line. Here the cattle cars jammed with the innocents of Europe came in and amid confusion the selection process began. The SS doctors chose those fit to work and sentenced the others to death. Standing on the railway siding, I can hear the murmur of low voices, the mumbled, stuttered fear, the clatter of suitcases and the snap of jackboots.

The camp stretches far in all directions. Most of the buildings were destroyed by the retreating SS in January 1945, but enough remain to give you an idea of the layout and the conditions of the camp. Words cannot capture this place. It strikes an emotional chord in a way that Auschwitz completely fails to. Standing alone in one of the blocks, a converted horse stable that held over 1,000 prisoners, I see the triple bunk beds, walk the earthen floor, and breathe the old stench. I don’t know whether to fall to my knees and weep or to run from the block screaming.

After chasing the black cat, I spend an hour wandering the mossy field where the outlines of a dozen warehouses remain. It was here that the worldly possessions of a million innocents were sifted of valuables and stored. The SS destroyed the buildings, but even now, more than 60 years on, and you can still find rusted cutlery and other small items. Chancing upon such personal possessions hits close to home. 1.5 million is a lot of people and it’s difficult to imagine each one’s individual existence. What was it Stalin said about one death being a tragedy and one million being a statistic?

If you can breeze through Auschwitz in twenty minutes, Birkenau requires much longer. Take time to sit by the ruins of one of the four crematoria (but don’t smoke cigarettes and talk on mobile phones like I saw two women do). Try to imagine the systematic destruction of 1.5 million people: the work involved, the administration, the ashes to dump, the SS guards complaining to each other that the number of Jews never ends. (‘Come on, Hansie, just another hour of this and then our shift is finished.’) Too hard to picture; violence as lifestyle, the stench of burning flesh the normal smell, the annihilation of a people the routine, mundane day’s work. It happened, it is ghastly, so where does that leave us?

I am Australian. I have lived in Germany for almost six years. I have discovered the Germans, contrary to their stereotype, to be humorous, honest, cheeky and loyal. And yet, Auschwitz-Birkenau is more a part of them than it is of me. These modern Germans are not responsible, but they cannot ignore the connection. Or is it that we are all responsible? While the Holocaust was a horrific event, it was not the first of its kind. Our history is full of attempts to wipe out racial and ethnic groups (I could quote the bible extensively), my history included.

To that end, Auschwitz-Birkenau is a memorial to all the nameless victims of genocide, a symbol of our propensity for evil, which counter-balances our limited attempts at benevolence. We are not perfect, we are not all powerful; we are weak creatures who succumb easily to violence (often when it is government policy – the persecution of Australian Aborigines is an excellent example) and we are able to commit unimaginable crimes.

But then again, perhaps it’s better to smile for the camera, turn your back on the pile of toothbrushes, jump back on the bus and hit the castles near Krakow.

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