Reszel Castle, Poland

An atmospheric wood-paneled apothecary stood near the main square. A tiny bell chimed as I opened the door. High on a shelf rested black iron scales. The language barrier was a problem so I just pointed at my head and said “Boom!”, the universal expression of headache.

Armed with a couple of tablets I walked back through the old town to the castle under a deep blue November sky.

Then, the mist rolled in. That deep blue sky from a paragraph ago quickly blanked and smudged. From a clear view of smoky chimneys, you suddenly couldn’t see the hand on the end of your arm. The mist lay thick and low and as the streetlights flickered on, dim yellows swirled into the mix.

Bordered by the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad to the east and buffeted on the north by the Baltic Sea, this remote Polish region of lakes and giant brick churches is quiet in the winter months. The castle dates back to the 14th century but battered by wars and requisitioned by Prussians and communists, what’s left is a medieval keep surrounded by crumbling stone walls. The remaining rooms have been converted into a lovely hotel.

Our room was an atmospheric circular guard tower. Wooden stairs twined around the inner wall and each floor had its own microclimate. Old arrow slits looked across the town’s twisting river and a squadron of mosquitoes hiked over to feast on us at night. The castle’s furniture had been carved by the Polish sculptor Boleslaw Marschall and fitted snugly against the curved tower walls. A television and downstairs toilet muted the medieval atmosphere and we bathed our six month old baby in the Jacuzzi.

In the evening, branches flitted against the skylights and threw shadows around the walls. We walked to the church. Inside a lone figure rocked back and forth in the pew, eyes closed, hands clasped. We tiptoed out, passing a woman in rags poking into litter bins with her walking stick.

The last woman hanged in Europe for witchcraft supposedly haunted the castle, but we never saw her. Instead we bolted the door and watched a scarily bad Jean-Claude Van Damme film, dubbed into Polish. We drank Hungarian Tokai and cheap Latvian sparkling wine. In the morning I was back at the apothecary, pointing once more at my head and saying “Boom!”

When is a tourist attraction not a tourist attraction?

When it has Arbeit Macht Frei written above the entrance and harbours the apparatus for millions of executions. Auschwitz has been open to the public for a good number of years. Do you need to justify a visit? I guess some tourists have a conscience-wrestling match and decide to skip it for various reasons, but judging by the coach park and the organised tours from Krakow, curiosity gets the better of most.

I saw many older people crying and also busloads of schoolkids play-fighting, bored. What can it mean to a ten year old? How do you begin to explain it? Concentration camps are a part of history, albeit history in its most awful guise. This is no First World War battleground, where your imagination has to add noise and mud and gunfire. All the fixtures are still at the camp, the barbed wire, the 'showers', endless railtrack.

A short film forms an introduction to the horrors. Full of crackly edits and stomping boots. It looks so cold in black and white and the striped prisoners all drained and gaunt. Leaving through an unremarkable door, you walk into the camp with its lying sign suggesting work brings freedom.

It's the scale that hits hardest. The order and symmetry of the construction is terrifyingly vast. Whole rooms contain the remains of the everyday; shaving brushes, shoes, hair, spectacles. All stacked to the ceiling and stripped of their context. The photographs are equally harrowing; bodies stacked like butchers meat, the shaved heads and twiggy limbs. One of an uncovered mass grave was grotesque and simultaneously compelling. One corpse was lying half submerged by the hardened mud and you couldn’t work out where the body ended and the ground began.

The showers were simply squat brick buildings. The sort of structure that graces any campsite. Except, in camp, you have options. These were one-way showers, a mass guillotine. You can view the holes where Zyklon B was piped in. I remember a tourist asking the guide a very detailed scientific question about the composition of the poison. The guide became impatient, "does it really matter what it was?"

On the way out, a young boy asked a received wisdom question, "is it true that birds don't fly over Auschwitz?" The guide had a stock response, "birds fly over the camp, but they never sing." The rain started hammering down as I came out. I rushed to find cover. By the exit is a café, but how can you eat in Auschwitz?