I have trundled down the tracks from Amsterdam to Krakow for a wedding, whinging all the way about the quality of the coffee, the heat of the day, the endless delays. 

And now I am here on an abandoned siding, with just one ancient windowless truck to consider, painted the colour of dried blood. No windows.

Behind it are fences of ancient barbed wire, wooden gates and wide dusty tracks leading to the ghostly remains of hut after hut after hut, all burned down, leaving just the small brick chimneys that survived the inferno, poking up proudly out of the grass, like a crap modern art installation.

I am standing at a decision point. The eighty or so starved men, women and children  who were crammed inside this carriage will have been going one of three ways – to the work camp, to the infirmary or to the gas chamber. A number of them will have already died, having failed to endure as much as 10 days and nights in the truck, not knowing where they were, not knowing where they were going.

A Nazi doctor had less than 30 seconds to assess each person and then casually wave a hand left or right. Left meant walking through the wire fence and into the camp, seemingly safe – for now. Right meant back on the train to the end of the line, a few hundred metres to the edge of the camp and the underground ‘undressing’ room, where hair would be cut (and kept) belongings given a number and a ticket issued as if you might be coming back to reclaim them.

From there, the naked crowd would be herded quickly and roughly, no time to think or react, through a narrow passage and into the ‘showers’.

And next door would be the furnaces, belching out ash and smoke, and presumably an unspeakable smell.

All this ghastly infrastructure was blown up and set fire to, as the Russian army neared. But enough remains to imagine walking down the steps into the undressing room, being shoved into a gas chamber, or becoming one of the workers piling up corpses on trolleys and shovelling them into the furnaces, or scraping up the ashes and scattering them across the adjoining fields or trucking them out for dumping into the Vistula where presumably they would coagulate into clods that might flow all the way to Krakow.

Nothing prepares you for the industrial scale of the death camp. Thousands brought in, killed and disposed of day after day after day. We shuffle past displays of human hair as long and tall as two haystacks, mountainous piles of shoes, the gibbets at the morning roll-call square, Mengele’s medical room.

A long long corridor displays ‘registration’ photographs of men and women with roughly shaved heads and the familiar striped prison clothes. Their expressions are generally blank, tired, mistrustful, confused, scared. But some are smiling. As if a smile is going to help.

We have a day and a night to process all this before donning our best togs for a family wedding. Much drinking and dancing and laughing and clapping. So much life. So much optimism about the loving couple’s future.

I am advised not to spoil the atmosphere with too much talk of Auschwitz. Instead I swap polite small talk over the pork loin main with a great-aunt about the pros and cons of Mediterranean cruises and her husband’s enthusiasm for pilgrim routes, and the travails of managing an apple orchard.

Meanwhile the wedding Whatsapp group swells with badly cropped images of the bride and groom making vows, cutting a cake, having a dance, making a speech, being showered with rose petals. Vodka and beer flow and the Irish arm of the family become gradually more rowdy. The Polish contingent take over the music. Oom-pah disco blares out and a huge conga staggers through the room, out into the gardens and then back again.

It’s time to go home before drink entirely takes me. I have already been chastised for ‘booing the conga’, and then asked by the younger Irish boys if I might adopt them as their ‘new dad’. Somewhere on the way back to the hotel I lose my sunglasses in the dark.

In the morning, the phone pings every 5 mins with alerts from the Whatsapp group. Every other post is an image of a positive Covid test. We have shared more than joy.

I want my Whatsapp to be full of loving thankyous, teasing jokes, party photos and pleas for lost items. Instead the sick list grows and grows – Grandpa has it, son-in-law  has it but his kids don’t, Aunty  is ill but isn’t taking a test….

As the phone continues to ping, I board my train. I am back on the tracks, perhaps the same ones that carried that dried-blood red carriage to Birkenau.