Cold and emptiness: Barbara Miller reflects on a visit to Auschwitz

_This week marked the 70th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp, and hundreds of now-elderly former inmates returned to pay tribute to the dead, and bear witness to the horrors they experienced there. The haunting and beautiful images from the anniversary made correspondent Barbara Miller reflect on her visit to the site of the death camp. _

It looked bitterly cold in Poland this week as survivors and dignitaries gathered in a specially constructed tent at the gates of Auschwitz, the most notorious of Nazi Germany's death camps, to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation.

Cold is the feeling I remember most strongly about my visit to Auschwitz some years back.

Cold, and a desperate feeling of emptiness.

We arrived by bus, spilling out as if to visit any other tourist site, but from the moment you arrive you question what it is you have come for.

Is it to be educated? Shocked? To pay tribute? To tick a box and say you've been? I even questioned whether it was some kind of awful voyeurism.

There seems no appropriate speed or demeanour with which to approach a visit to Auschwitz, conversation seems redundant, superfluous.

I never quite got over the cafeteria there. It was the slices of cake with sickly bright pink icing that really disturbed me. Nothing about that seemed right.

I was also disconcerted to discover that Auschwitz was in fact made up of two sites, in reality it was more a network of death and forced labour camps.

The site with the famous sign that reads 'Arbeit macht frei' (work sets you free) is situated at the gates to the Auschwitz part of the camp, several kilometres away from Birkenau, home to the gas chambers.

More than one million people rolled through the gate at Birkenau on those now famous train tracks and never came out.

Visting Birkenau is a bleak experience. You are relatively free to wander over a large area of land where the camp buildings once stood – you can go into one of the sleeping blocks and see the wooden bunks inmates slept on.

Three months was how long you could reasonably hope to survive at Auschwitz - that is if you were not selected for death immediately upon arrival.

In those three months you were likely to become emaciated, sick and so weak that you might at any moment keel over and die at roll call or slip away during the night, if the camp guards did not do the job for you.

As I stood there on that bitterly cold day in the middle of the former camp grounds I could not imagine making it through a single night in those conditions, and wondered at the strength of the human spirit that some, not many, but some made it out of here alive.

Several hundred of them came to Auschwitz this week. Around the world other survivors marked the day too.

In London at a memorial service I attended, Vera and Avram Schaufeld talked of the loss of their extended Jewish families in the Holocaust.

When Avram emerged from the camps in 1945 he discovered only he and another cousin were still alive. Vera, who was sent to the UK aged nine when her parents saw the writing on the wall for the Jewish community in then Czechoslovakia, never saw her mother and father again after she waved goodbye to them at Prague station.

Auschwitz was not the first concentration camp I visited and not the last. Each one has been different. At Ravensbrueck in northern Germany I was horrified to see ledgers meticulously filled in each day with how many people in each category of prisoner were alive at the beginning and end of each day.

At Mauthausen in Austria a string quartet played on a simmering summer's day. The music was beautiful, the mood tranquil.

In Sachsenhausen north of Berlin I did not really know what to do with myself and became preoccupied with wondering what it must be like to live in the village now, in the shadow of the camp.

The survivors who spoke this week urged the world to keep alive the memories of the Holocaust. They know they do not have many years left.

They defied the Nazis' warped wish to exterminate them, but old age is catching up. That is why it is so very important to preserve the sites of former concentration camps, because once you have visited one, you will not ever forget.