I won’t say I was excited to be there. Excited is the wrong word to use when visiting such a dark piece of history, a place where so many souls passed. I had been granted unprecedented access to the camps where the Nazis had committed horrible atrocities. As a historian, I was excited, but as a human being, I felt an unexpected lump of dread mixed with the vague feeling of disgust. The gates proclaimed that work would make you free, but the truth was that no matter how hard they’d worked, some would never see freedom, much less family or friends again. The structure of the place was purely Nazi, they had organized and filed humans, the way they…

I won’t say I was excited to be there. Excited is the wrong word to use when visiting such a dark piece of history, a place where so many souls passed. I had been granted unprecedented access to the camps where the Nazis had committed horrible atrocities. As a historian, I was excited, but as a human being, I felt an unexpected lump of dread mixed with the vague feeling of disgust. The gates proclaimed that work would make you free, but the truth was that no matter how hard they’d worked, some would never see freedom, much less family or friends again. The structure of the place was purely Nazi, they had organized and filed humans, the way they…

I won’t say I was excited to be there. Excited is the wrong word to use when visiting such a dark piece of history, a place where so many souls passed. I had been granted unprecedented access to the camps where the Nazis had committed horrible atrocities. As a historian, I was excited, but as a human being, I felt an unexpected lump of dread mixed with the vague feeling of disgust. The gates proclaimed that work would make you free, but the truth was that no matter how hard they’d worked, some would never see freedom, much less family or friends again. The structure of the place was purely Nazi, they had organized and filed humans, the way they…