He pushed my passport back at me while still holding it firmly in his grasp and pointed to the word 'Lebanon'. "What is that?" he asked.

"It's a country." My place of birth, after a lifetime spent in the United States, still identified me even though it's a country I vaguely remember. He looked at me like I was pulling his leg and telling him of a mythical place. He had never heard of it. Is it possible, especially now with the current conflict broadcast around the world at all hours? Was Poland that isolated?

After many more questions, assurances that I was there only to see Krakow, proof that I would be leaving in four days and production of my hotel confirmation, I finally received my stamp of approval. I was the last to leave the customs area and across the gate I could see that most of the passengers had already claimed their luggage and left the airport.

I arrived in the city by 7 a.m., dropped off my bags and headed off to the old town square, about three blocks away. It was starting to get warm and it promised to be a hot and humid day. Krakow was just starting its morning rituals - setting up cafe tables for breakfast, people walking their dogs, obwarzanki (a ring shaped pretzel) vendors rolling in their carts, the occasional tourist strolling across the expanse of the ancient space, backpack in place, and a flurry of activity in the square (the largest medieval one in Europe) getting ready for the upcoming weekend.

I breathed in the tempo of the city, slow and languid, while I contemplated my plan for the day. Throughout the course of my trip exploring the capitals of many former communist block countries, I resisted visiting their venerated and famous Jewish quarters for several personal reasons, one of which was that I didn't want to see a ghost town - three-dimensional reminders of the horrors human beings inflict upon each other.

My upbringing had exposed me to my own cultural horrors meted out in the early part of the 20th century, and I had used up my lifetime quota of horrifying images and stories long ago. But somehow I had a deep urge to see Auschwitz. It was a place that deserved to be a ghost town because it wasn't a place for life but of death.

The bus ride lasted a hot and dusty one and a half hours through the countryside. Finally we were deposited just outside the chain link gates and we walked in the last 300 meters. Approaching the entrance, the place looked very unassuming, a cluster of brick buildings, and an iron gate with the motto 'Arbeit Macht Frei' (work brings freedom) curled above it, streets, lamps, all very civilized like a miniature town.

The origins of the place were army barracks for the Polish army. Later the German SS converted it to house Polish POWs and resistance fighters, followed by Soviet POW's. Only later did it become a place of internment for undesirable minorities, including Poles, Roma (Gypsy), homosexuals (not lesbians), political prisoners, handicapped people and Jews.

The scale of the place didn't become evident until I took the shuttle bus and arrived at Birkenau's (Auschwitz II) "Gate of Death" about three kilometers away, which used to be the old village of Brzezinka and was taken over and converted into a camp by orders of SS Reichsfuhrer Heinrich Himmler.

The original buildings were stables that housed 40-50 horses and were eventually forced to hold 300 to 800 people. The place was huge, HUGE. It defies description. All the reading, documentaries, stories did not prepare me for the scale of the operation - 425 acres surrounded by an electric barbed wire fence containing 90,000 people (25% of the people who actually arrived at the camp) in 350 barracks only a few which remain intact.

The rest of the structures were torn down and only their chimneys remain stretched over the landscape as far as the eye can see like stunted tree trunks. It took 10 minutes to walk from the gate through which the trains arrived, to the back of the camp where the gas chambers and crematoria were located.

On the way on the either side of the train tracks were the camps - women on the left and men on the right. The crunch of the gravel under my sandals was the only sound, all else being absorbed and muffled by the barrenness of the place.

It is said that no birds would fly over Birkenau because of the fumes and the stench caused by the camp and the crematorium. I didn't see any now either, 60 years later. Birds are smart, studies now show, they don't repeat harmful behavior. Do they avoid this place, the memory of it passed on from mother to chick? Like the stories I heard from my parents and grandparents of their horrors during the genocide. Would I ever visit the desert of Der Zor or would I avoid it for fear of those black and white, grainy images of my youth becoming colorful three-dimensional realities?

I returned to Auschwitz I to see the "Death Block" where court was conducted along with medical experiments and torture. Located on the end of the "street" at the edge of the camp next to a lookout tower, it has a private courtyard abutting it behind gates.

Peering in through the gate I could see on the far end the "Wall of Death" where prisoners were shot - one bullet to the head at close range - following their sentencing by the Gestapo Police Court.

There are nooks and crannies in which people had placed offering, candles, flowers, stones, bits of paper with intimate expressions of feelings. Touching it felt smooth and rough at the same time. I can picture a prisoner standing or being held against the wall, murmuring his last prayer or thinking his last defiant thought, or remembering a child or spouse or possibly thinking none of that, simply numb from the harrowing experience and wanting it all to end.

The building itself looked like all the others. I had been in some of the others where I saw thousands of shoes, eyeglasses tangled into a mess of wires, hundreds of prosthetics and crutches like dismembered reminders of the bodies to which they offered support, a room full of kitchen utensils prisoners had brought with them in the hope that the promise of "relocation" was the truth, tons of hair sheared from the corpses and the bolts of fabric woven from these locks with traces of the poison used to gas them embedded in the strands.

I entered the building with a group visiting from the United States. They were middle-aged, white, I assume upper-middle class, dressed in their ill-fitting cargo shorts and logo shirts (Tim's Tune-Up Shop), following their tour guide while murmuring complaints about the heat and lack of immediately available water.

They raptly listened to the story of a group of Israeli handicapped children on a recent visit, who were told of how those who arrived at the camp and were handicapped and Jewish, in essence, received a double death sentence, condemned to die for either one of these reasons. Upon hearing of a fate he escaped by a mere 60 years, an Israeli little boy is inspired and rises to his feet to sing the Israeli national anthem.

The Americans heard this story and gave the conditioned response of "Awww," while the tour guide beamed at her audience with a benevolent smile of self- satisfaction at imparting a touching story and receiving the appropriate sounds from her audience. The nagging sense that this building must be experienced alone, like the prisoners who experienced the horrors of being there and their deaths without fanfare, prompts me to walk away from the group and proceed on my own.

Descending into the cool basement the silence was broken up by another tour guide desperately trying to keep his particular group of teenagers in an organized mass. I made my way down the hall peering into the various detention rooms where the condemned were made to wait their time of execution.

Many had attempted to carve their mark into walls and doors. There are religious icons, names with dates or addresses, short notes to family or brief statements proving their existence. All of them signs of the human spirit. These were real people who willingly suffered for their beliefs, be it religious, political or humanitarian. The SS did not discriminate.

At the end of the hall stands a room with its gaping door beckoning me to approach. I feel its power and instinctively my body rebels against going forward. I struggle against this feeling telling myself that it is a room like any other and that it cannot be worse than what I have already seen.

I am alone in the hall and the silence is deep, the sound of my breath echoing off the close confines of the walls. I enter a room as large as the others, except this is filled with three brick cubicles, each two feet wide and, although the tops are in various states of demolition, it is clear that they stood about seven feet high.

There are double iron doors at knee height, the inner one is a gate with bars and the outer one is a solid iron door with a latch. The only way to enter the cubicle is to crawl into it and stand. They are torture chambers where prisoners were forced to stand in the dark for hours and days on end, possibly without food, water, or any type of relief.

Claustrophobia hits me like a force in the gut. I can no longer think intelligently but can only feel the knot of emotions in the pit of my stomach. I try to breath deeply to calm myself but all I manage to do is take in more of the fear that emanates from the stone. I turn to walk out and make it to the door. I can't go further and I lean against the wall struggling to hold back tears and the gasping sobs threatening to escape, trying to maintain composure.

I am not as quiet as I think and a woman sticks her head into the hallway trying to find the source of the sound. She sees me and retreated but returns a second later. We make eye contact and she takes a step towards me unsure whether she should approach me or not. No words are exchanged. I can see her indecision and then it disappears as she approaches me confidently, puts her arm around me and I turn into her shoulder and finally and loudly release the tears.

After moments I finally pull away, she retreats and allows me to walk past her, down the hall, up the stairs and out into the fresh air and sunshine. Not a syllable having been exchanged between us.

It is time to leave this place where even the oppressive heat and humidity feels like an extension of the staleness of the basement of Block 11. I begin to walk towards the gate and come across a group of students with the Israeli flag draped over their shoulders singing the national anthem as they march past a row of buildings dedicated to the 21 different nationalities that perished in this place.

Each has a different exhibit showcasing their people and the struggles they endured. The students seem unconcerned. I can feel something harden inside me. If anything, a visit to Auschwitz has shown the diversity of the people affected by WWII German policy and that it isn't the one-dimensional depiction portrayed in the media.

It was about individuals; not ideologies or political agendas of countries. I imagine that the person (be it Pole, Soviet, Roma or Jew) being tortured, starved, and condemned to die an agonizing death was not concerned about anything beyond his or her personal pain and would be bothered by how their death is used as a marketing tool for a movie, news clip, organization or country.

Were these children missing the point , had their educators missed the point, or had they simply passed down what they had been taught? Does one group's suffering justify inflicting the same on others when the tables are turned? The repetition of history in just the last 100 years is an extension of this attitude I see displayed before me.

Would the Jewish Holocaust have taken place had it not been for the Armenian Genocide? What of the Palestinian - now Islamic - struggle had there been no Holocaust? Or Rwanda or Sudan? What of the state in Lebanon? When do the oppressed become the oppressors and what determines that one is justified in its actions and the other is not?

From the vastness of Birkenau, the closeness of Auschwitz I, to the claustrophobic confines of the basement of Block 11, the horror becomes more intimate with each location. There is no clear number of how many people perished here, since record keeping in the beginning was crude and in the end it was sloppy.

Some things are clear though;, hundreds of thousands of people died here, and it's not about the political conditions of today (and the exclusive claim placed on this place), but the pain and fear of all those individuals who passed through here and what we have yet to learn from it that matters most.

The naivete of the customs agent was an ironic contrast to the worldliness of Auschwitz. Even though Krakow is only 60 kilometers away, the life and vibrancy of the people is refreshing, and I can only finally breathe, several hours after leaving Auschwitz behind, and can sit on the square with a tall glass of beer, watching the activity before me. To be so close to such evil, acknowledge its existence and go on to create a city and a life that is sweet and charming without losing its sense of innocence is an encouraging sign.

I chose my trip to Krakow on a lark having no idea what to expect. I am now drawn to it for its grace, beauty, history, friendly people, vodka and charm. It is an unpretentious city with tourists and locals mingling comfortably in the cafes and restaurants circling the square where every night there is a concert, roving musicians, performers and people having a general good time. This is Life.