Once we arrived (after our group-think-insense of "Who would build a big hotel at the gates of Auschwitz??!!", and "Why would you build a nice new house for your family across the street from Auschwitz??!!") Filip herded us into a larger group, made sure we got our headsets, and turned us over to our camp guide.
Our guide at the camps was a little Polish guy with piercing blue eyes and really excellent English. Retired from electrical engineering, this was a pensioner’s job he had obviously undertaken to share his wisdom of life. He was very earnest, and walked quickly, but listening to the heavy and labored breathing coming through the my headset at even his minor exertions such as climbing stairs, I really thought he was gonna have a heart attack right there in a puddle in the mud (and human ash) streets of Auschwitz.
He herded us very quickly through the tour, giving us continual commentary between pants and gasps, and I felt we were getting really good info... until we passed a yarmulke-wearing guide who had pulled his group of 30 close into a corner and was passionately relating an anecdote, squeezing his fists and flailing his arms, almost as if he had been there and the outrage was his own. In English. And I desperately wanted to jump ship from my little dude and join this group.
There's no way I can remember everything I heard during this tour, all the facts and statistics... and I sorely lack the vocabulary to convey the emotional aspects of what we saw. But for me, the element for which no words are possible is the why, the reason, the motivation, the justification. Inside my mind there is only a grey swirling, churning cloud where no words exist, where there only exists a heavy black sense of "why?"
So, I'll show a bunch of photos, and list a bunch of factoids that struck me as particularly memorable. But just know that, as millions before me, I am incompetent to put even my own emotions into words in the face of this inhuman atrocity.