By Guillermo Mayuri Aguilar

Frischmann. One of the specialists at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial opens a metal cabinet in the conservation storage area, where part of a collection of approximately 3,800 suitcases belonging to people deported to Auschwitz is kept. There is no glass separating us. We are half a meter from one of them, and on its surface, a name is visible: Frischmann Hedwig . The proximity to history is unsettling. That suitcase belonged to a person deported by the Nazis. It is not just a museum piece: it is material testimony to the atrocities committed at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We’re finishing the first day of our seminar, after several hours touring Auschwitz I. Our last stop is one of the warehouses where the Memorial stores the belongings of the deportees. A pungent smell lingers in the air. I listen to the specialists explain the conservation procedures, the fragility of the objects, and the importance of preserving their authenticity. The goal isn’t to restore them to their original appearance, but to prevent further deterioration. Every intervention requires studies and precautions: these belongings are also evidence of what happened.

During the tour, we discovered that the collection also includes everyday objects like potato peelers. Someone considered it essential to carry one of these utensils during their deportation, without imagining the fate that awaited them. Each possession belonged to someone who had a family, a home, a job, and dreams. All that a number can never express.

Our first day comes to an end. We descend the stairs. My colleague opens the door to the old barracks, now converted into a laboratory. I watch my step to avoid tripping, though all I really need is to breathe. My companion lets out a look of astonishment. What’s going on? I step through the door. It’s night, and there are no more visitors among the buildings of the Auschwitz I Memorial. Being alone in that place is hard to process.

I’ve come to Poland to participate in a seminar for journalists and media professionals, organized by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum and Memorial through its International Center for Education on Auschwitz and the Holocaust. For several days, accompanied by specialists, we tour the former complex and learn about its operation and preservation. The Center has accommodation facilities for volunteers and participants in its programs. Spending the night there, in a silent environment, is a reflective experience.

I had read about the Holocaust, seen photographs, and studied its main events. But being here transforms my relationship with that information. Established by the Nazis in 1940 on Polish territory occupied and annexed to the Third Reich, Auschwitz initially functioned as a concentration camp primarily for political prisoners. From 1942 onward, while continuing that function, it also became the largest extermination center for European Jews. Between 1940 and 1945, approximately 1.1 million people were murdered there, nearly one million of them Jewish.

Numbers allow us to grasp the scale of crime, but they can also turn it into an abstraction. A million people is a number we pronounce in seconds and can hardly imagine. In contrast, a suitcase with a surname forces us to stop and think about a family like mine or the family of whoever is reading these lines.

Auschwitz is not merely a place dedicated to remembering the victims. It is the scene of a crime. The buildings, the barbed wire, the roads, the ruins of the crematoria, and the belongings of the deportees constitute material evidence. Their preservation is a responsibility to safeguard the evidence of what happened.

The history of this place was constantly evolving: the facilities, their functions, the prisoner population, and the extermination procedures all changed. Studying it in 1940 is not the same as studying it in 1944. A firsthand account from the early years doesn’t necessarily allow us to understand the conditions faced by those who arrived later. Each experience must be interpreted within its historical context.

The complex comprised three main camps and an extensive network of subcamps. The two sites we are visiting, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, are approximately 3.5 kilometers apart. Auschwitz III-Monowitz was primarily associated with the exploitation of forced labor for German industry.

Auschwitz I, built on the site of former Polish military barracks, held over 20,000 prisoners. There you’ll find the famous sign ” Arbeit macht frei” (Work sets you free), as well as the former crematorium and gas chamber.

Birkenau, whose construction began in 1941 on the site of a Polish village, was immensely larger. By 1944, it housed approximately 90,000 people. That year, a railway platform began operating within the camp, where transports of deportees arrived directly. Previously, numerous trains had arrived at other platforms located outside the camp. At Birkenau, selection determined who would be assigned to forced labor and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers.

We arrived at Birkenau and toured what was a veritable engineering marvel of death. We walked from the railway platform that appears in historical photographs to the ruins of the gas chambers. Many of those selected to die were taken directly from the train to the extermination facilities, without even being registered as prisoners. Making this journey, accompanied by explanations from the Memorial’s specialists, allows one to grasp the barbarity of the procedure.

Four clandestine photographs taken during the summer of 1944, near Crematorium V, are particularly disturbing. They were taken by members of the Sonderkommando , groups of prisoners, mostly Jewish, forced by the SS to perform tasks related to the bodies of those murdered in the gas chambers.

Two of those photographs show corpses being cremated in open pits; another, naked women among the trees, shortly before being murdered. The last captures the treetops and the sky. We don’t know if that framing was a consequence of fear, urgency, or the impossibility of pointing the camera without being discovered. What is chilling is that the experts lead us to the environment where those photographs are believed to have been taken. The ruins, the trees, the intensity of the light: the scene is before us.

Auschwitz needs to be understood. Here arises one of the most unsettling reflections of the seminar: the horror lies not only in the murder, but also in the selection that preceded it. There were people whose deaths were decided as soon as they stepped off the train.

When the transports of deported Jews arrived, the families were separated. SS doctors gave people a cursory evaluation and determined who would be assigned to forced labor and who would be sent directly to the gas chambers. Young children, the elderly, and those deemed unfit for work were generally sent to their deaths.

Those selected to die unknowingly began their journey from the railway platform to the gas chamber. Their bodies would later be incinerated.

No one is born destined to become a perpetrator. This is another idea that emerges while traveling through the countryside. There were processes of indoctrination, discrimination, propaganda, persecution, and dehumanization. The mass murder also required administrative decisions and technical expertise that made that machinery possible.

It is disturbing that operational problems led to the refinement of criminal procedures. Doctors, engineers, administrators, and SS members participated in this system in various ways. Responsibility for what happened cannot be limited solely to those who directly carried out the murders.

Walking through Birkenau raises unavoidable questions. What does it mean to resist when there is virtually no chance of survival? Did the world know? Why wasn’t more done?

This experience also leads me to reflect on education. How do we explain the Holocaust to new generations today? How do we help them understand their history without reducing it to dates, statistics, or images designed solely to produce horror?

Knowing, empathizing, reflecting, and acting. Four verbs that summarize an educational responsibility: to study the facts rigorously, to recognize the humanity of the victims, to examine the decisions that made the crimes possible, and to allow that learning to influence how we relate to others.

I would like to conclude this account with the story of Franciszka Studzińska , a prisoner identified by the number 26283, who crafted a rosary from breadcrumbs. In Auschwitz, prisoners typically received about 300 grams of bread a day, an insufficient amount to endure the camp’s conditions and forced labor. Franciszka used some of this bread to create a prayer item. She died on April 4, 1943. Her fellow prisoners preserved the rosary, which is now part of the Memorial’s collections.

I think about what it means to dedicate a portion of the food needed for survival to crafting a prayer object. In the midst of hunger and death, Franciszka found a way to express her faith. I then think of one word: hope .

Why visit the Auschwitz Memorial today? My personal answer: to find the questions that should never cease to challenge us.