As far as I remember, the Holocaust or the World Wars were never part of our school syllabus growing up. I believe that by the time we got to the French Revolution stage of history, it was time for the school population to divide between Matric and O Levels and thenceforth, the subcontinent’s history was the only history.

Thus it was that the first time I read about the Nazis in any real form was in the Epilogue/Publisher’s Note to my Penguin edition of Anne Frank’s Diary. In the wake of a twelve year old’s infatuation with a very relatable teenaged protagonist, her tragic end at a concentration camp was heartrending. Since then, the Holocaust has a narrative that goes parallel to mine and, I’m sure, many western citizens’ lives. This is in no small part because of the award-winning as well as popular movies and shows. But alongside this narrative we come across in popular culture, there lies a dark thread wending its way through different shades of Holocaust denial, sometimes in response to Israeli atrocities and sometimes caused by sheer perversity.

With all this in mind, I have always been curious about the concentration camps. Being South Asian, I know I have no direct link with these (though not other) crimes committed during the Second World War. Even so, it is hard to escape conflicting emotions, the most prominent of which is the uncomfortable suspicion that you may be perceived as a voyeur of somebody else’s trauma. A sort of trauma appropriation -- cousin to the much vilified cultural appropriation. Despite this, I went to visit Auschwitz at the end of this summer. I had started reading Nikolaus Wachsmann’s KL: A history of the Nazi concentration camps but since the book is fat and airlines less than lenient towards my book-laden overweight luggage, I left it unfinished at home. Of the camp itself, therefore, I only knew that it was in Poland.

I decided to stay in Krakow instead of Warsaw, since it is only an hour away from Auschwitz and my plan was to make a day trip to see it on my second day in Poland. The day before, I walked around the old town browsing its book stores in the semi-lit dusk. There was plenty to read on the concentration camps, the world wars and the Warsaw Uprising. It is clearly a place still haunted by its ghosts and attempting to make sense of them. I only bought one on the Warsaw Uprising and decided to go back to my lodgings and rewatch The Pianist. Big mistake. Seeing movies about horrific events sitting in the safety of your home, thousands of miles away from the original site is very different from watching them when you’re about to see the place and spending the night alone in an eerily quiet neighbourhood. On top of that, I also saw a German film called Labyrinth of Lies (every movie-watching service figures out where you’re going with your search and you being a glutton for punishment go further down the rabbit hole).

The first thing that strikes you about Auschwitz-Birkenau is the silence. There were throngs of people to visit, but inside, everyone went quiet, overpowered by the grey structures and a dreadful awareness of what happened there. The only sounds are the various tour-guides’ voices and the footsteps. Of the three original camps, Auschwitz and Birkenau are the ones open to the public -- the first was the Polish army’s barracks, turned into a labour camp by the Nazis where they sent the unwanted populations of Jews, Gypsies and others; the second was built especially as a labour and death camp. Birkenau is especially chilling -- it is vast fields with a train track running through it, gas chambers and stark barracks made of stone (from the houses evacuated in the nearby village of Oswiencim) and wood (after the stone ran out).

Auschwitz has been turned into a museum; some of the barracks have been converted into rooms with pictures taken by the Germans whose apparent obsession with documentation provided the proof of their activities after the camps were liberated by the Russians. Some other buildings have been set up as models of the original "facilities". But by far the most gut-wrenching are the ones that have glass cases filled with things owned by the people who died there, ranging from shoes to household utensils to the crutches and artificial legs of the disabled who were gas chamber fodder as soon as they arrived.

My purpose is not to write in detail of all that is contained within those ghastly walls. I would like, instead, to write of the conversation I had with our guide, who had been doing this job for more than 15 years and spoke fondly of her late boss, the director of the museum, who had been a survivor of Auschwitz. When I asked if she had studied history as a subject, she laughed and said she’d hated it at school. Her interest in history and its retelling was sparked instead by the stories of her grandparents. She was Polish and one of her grandfathers had served in the Polish resistance against Hitler during the Second World War. He had told stories of his experiences, which she felt needed to be recorded and retold for posterity.

However, it was the stories of both her grandmothers that had pushed her finally into a job dedicated to not letting people forget what happened here -- they had both been at slave labour camps set up by the Germans during the War. "Not death camps like these," she told me, "but they suffered a lot, and so I tell the stories of those who cannot tell them themselves."

At the end of it, I was left with a lesson and a question. The lesson was that my feelings of being a voyeur of somebody else’s trauma were misplaced; we all need to appreciate and acknowledge the hardships faced by various peoples scattered across the face of this earth. The question was more problematic -- the Israeli nation has worked long and hard to raise awareness of what happened to them and tried to ensure that it is never repeated. How is it that other nations, whether they’ve been colonised or been the targets of genocide, have not been able to do the same for themselves at such a scale?