It was a suitably grey and rainy Tuesday that we set out for Auschwitz (or Oswiecim as it's known in Polish) from Krakow.

I'd been told by other backpackers that Auschwitz is definitely worth going to, for shock value alone. But it's not something you should casually just walk into as though you were going into a chocolate factory. Last time I was in Krakow, my brother and I wanted to go there, but our parents said no. It's too depressing, too intense, they said. They didn't want to see it again.

Having been there now I tend to agree. It was one of those haunting experiences, walking the paths the prisoners walked. Going through the hallways of the barracks, their photos and dates of death were hung up on the walls by the hundreds and you feel as though they're all just watching you go by.

There were, as expected, whole rooms filled with suitcases and one with just childrens' shoes stacked up to the ceiling. Then there was the one with adult shoes. And the one which gave me shivers down my spine - the room of human hair, shaved off after extermination to be sold as a material to make cloth. They even showed you a sample of cloth made with hair.

The most disturbing things for me were probably the firing wall, where people were shot in the back of the head with silenced guns right next to one of the womens' barracks, and the crematorium. Here, people were herded into the gas chamber, gassed 700 at a time and slid into the furnace, 3 bodies at a time.
As I stood in the gas chamber, I barely even listened to the tour guide, I just stared at the holes in the ceiling where the poison gas was dropped through. Apparently the crematorium we were in was the small one, only capable of cremating 340 people per day. The "better" ones at the Birkenau camp could go through 2000 bodies a day.

I can't get over the echo in the gas chamber, either, especially when you imagine the sudden realisation of the hundreds of people in there that they are not going to be bathed, they are going to be murdered in a matter of minutes. The screams would have been deafening and only magnified by the echoes.

According to my tour guide, the unlucky sods who had to put the bodies into the furnaces were prisoners, too. I can't even begin to think about the trauma those poor people went through, shovelling the bodies of innocents, friends and family all day long.

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The tour guide was really nice and stayed back to describe a few extra things at the end, but this meant that I very nearly got stranded in Auschwitz for the night. To the point that the man at the bus station said that the last bus and minibus to Krakow had already left for the evening, and that my only chance was to catch a train.

The last train was in 15 minutes at the time, and the walk from the station had taken about 30-40 minutes earlier that day. Not surprisingly, I didn't feel like spending the night in this little town, even though it is green and lovely and has just had a horrible history. So I bolted all the way to the train station, getting there a minute before the train.

I much preferred sleeping in my youth hostel than in a town with the world's biggest cemetery with the ashes over a million people left in the soil.