Four days before the world commemorated the 71st anniversary of the liberation of the Nazis' Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps, I walked the same ground where - to quote Unesco's sombre words - "1.5 million people, among them a great number of Jews, were systematically starved, tortured and murdered".
The first image is of the gallows where the camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, was hanged for freely admitted war crimes in 1947. What he willingly did and had done at the behest of his Third Reich masters challenged my lifelong abhorrence of capital punishment. I resisted the challenge, as I do the temptation to loathe all Germans for what some, even many, did - with enthusiasm or under orders it would have been fatal to disobey - during the wretched period until the Nazis were defeated, but would dutifully have throttled him myself given the opportunity and strength. I hope the distinction is clear.
Unknown numbers of visitors to the beautiful Polish city of Krakow leave without making the 70km journey to the camps. Their reluctance is understandable.
There is something very discomforting about being whisked in groups around what has become a theme park to murder on an industrial scale, as essential as it is ghoulish, before returning to the cosy bars and restaurants around Krakow's Market Square. For most people, however, it seems unthinkable not to see the camps as a simple act of homage to their victims.
In one of the Auschwitz punishment cells, a Catholic priest, Maximilian Kolbe, voluntarily took the place of another man condemned by the Germans among 10 prisoners to be starved to death as a reprisal for an escape. Astonishingly, he survived this piece of Nazi inhumanity only to succumb to another, the injection of carbolic acid; he was made a saint by the Polish pope John Paul II 37 years after his martyrdom.
At first glance, the rows of drab brick-built buildings at Auschwitz might almost be mistaken for an unattractive series of industrial or residential buildings. The watchtowers suggest the grimmer reality and then the visitor comes across heartbreaking relics of genocide: the framed collections of shoes, tons of human hair, battered old suitcases and various personal effects left behind by those mercilessly herded into gas chambers, shot, hanged, infected with lethal disease or starved to death. And the makeshift gallows, the walls against which human beings were shot and the grotesque dormitories and sanitary arrangements.
Organised groups are whisked around the camp by efficient guides with scripts learned parrot-fashion, but delivered with dignity if also some appropriate coldness. If I went again, I would tour the camps as an individual to have more time to study the exhibits and contemplate the momentous significance of the surrounds.
A short drive from Auschwitz leads to the bleak entrance to Birkenau. As my wife observed, it is less museum-like than Auschwitz, with only the shells of some of the detention blocks standing and even greater evidence of the squalid conditions these poor prisoners endured.
To the right and left of the dark stone memorial lie the remains of crematoriums the Nazis tried to destroy, hoping to hide the evidence of their unspeakable brutality as liberation neared.
I like to think of the memorial as not only a tribute to the dead at these and other concentration and extermination camps from the Second World War and more recent history, but a solemn rebuke to the rotten far right movements of contemporary Europe, from Germans harking for the great age of Hitler to Hungarians devoid of compassion and what a great writer, David Jones, described - and hark this, it was in the Daily Mail - the "vision of Aryan chic" presented by the odious Jean-Marie Le Pen's granddaughter, Marion Marechal-Le Pen.
That is not to say that everyone in these rabidly nationalist movements is a fascist. But the Front National would struggle to shake my conviction that, even leaving aside the antisemitic rhetoric of J-M Le Pen that finally proved too much for his daughter, it is a party that has harboured, and probably still does, people who not only behave with proud thuggishness in crushing opposition (eg Femen protestors) and stopping journalists doing their work (same event) but broadly feel the wrong side won the Second World War.
Yet man's inhumanity to man did not begin with the Final Solution and did not end when the Nazis were defeated. Hatred lives on and manifests itself in all corners of the world, more savagely in some places than others.
I shall leave almost the last thoughts to a man I know only electronically and with whom my online relationship is hardly a model of warmth and common purpose. All the same, I commend Richard Smith's words to my own readers even though he and I disagree sharply on whether "monsters" is or is not an entirely fitting noun (and even whether I properly understood their meaning).
This is what Richard posted at Facebook on Wednesday, International Holocaust Memorial Day:
Surely today of all days we should be aware of the dangers of demonisation of particular religions or nationalities, the inhuman treatment of refugees and the places that those attitudes can lead us to. The discrimination against the Jews and the Holocaust was not committed by monsters, it was committed by ordinary people who had been persuaded to hate their fellow men and women because of their difference. People who put up anti-Muslim and anti-immigrant posts really need to think on that.
But the very last thought I wish to cite came in one of a number questions from my elder daughter, Christelle, about her parents' visit: "Dad, is it true the birds don't sing there?" She will have to discover the answer for herself.
* With thanks to Toby Simpson, see also the discussion at http://www.unesco.org/new/en/unesco/events/prizes-and-celebrations/celebrations/international-days/commemoration-in-memory-of-the-victims-of-the-holocaust-2016 Toby adds: "You can also look at the dual language exhibition on Nazi propaganda for children which I curated for the event, which has just gone on display in Paris http://www.wienerlibrary.co.uk/A-is-for-Adolf-UNESCO
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