And here is the second extract:

From April 2007. (Part of the description of a 10-day visit to Poland)

The first time I visited Auschwitz was in 1990, when I was at high school, as part of a students’ delegation. I remember that I was surprised and troubled by my lack of ability to feel real sadness at this place, to cry as my schoolmates did; I tried in vain to bring tears into my eyes and felt deeply guilty for not being able to do so. It was a sunny day and I looked angrily around me, at the meaningless concrete slabs of the ruined crematorium, the grass which grew between the rusting rails, the few preserved wooden barracks: what were these banal pieces of reality in comparison with the films I have seen, the books I have read and the stories I have heard? At that moment I felt that Auschwitz should be closed to the public and left as a black hole of evil on the face of the earth, to rot and fall to pieces until no stone or wood remain to tarnish the black-and-white abstractness of Memory.

            Time made me change my mind about destroying physical evidence to the Holocaust, as holocaust denial theories, which were once limited to a handful of hallucinatory historians, become amazingly widespread. Nevertheless, when my parents and I went to Poland I was determined not to visit the death camp again.  

            “How can a Jew be in Cracow and not visit Auschwitz?” wondered my father.

            “How can a Jew have breakfast at his hotel, go to Auschwitz and return for dinner?” I answered. “This is no tourist destination. Anyway, if you want to go there, go, I’ve done my share. Besides, with this book I visit Auschwitz every morning.”

            It so happened that we left the mountain resort of Zakopane much earlier than we planned and had the whole day ahead of us before we get to Cracow. We decided to make a detour and visit Sosnowiec, the city where my grandfather Edmund Ziskind was born and where he lived before the war. And it so happened that when the GPS calculated the shortest itinerary from Zakopane to Sosnowiec, this itinerary passed through the small town of Oswiecim. I did my best to find another route on the map; but the GPS had done a good job, all other alternatives were indeed much longer. I still hoped we will just pass through. But you don’t just pass by a road sign which says “Auschwitz”.

            I was wrong: Auschwitz has become a tourist destination. The huge parking lot was full of cars and buses. I mostly heard Polish around me – many Polish prisoners perished in Auschwitz and the camp is a national memorial site – but there were also groups from Italy, Spain, and other countries. As it was Saturday there were no Israeli groups; I didn’t hear German either. Things have changed: a modern visitor center was built at the entrance, complete with a cafeteria and a souvenir shop selling books, postcards and posters of birds on a wire. Inside the barracks of Auschwitz 1 it was the same old exhibition I remembered, the long texts on the walls and the dimply-lit mountains of hair and shoes, but as far as I understood this exhibition too will soon make way for a more modern one. In the alleys people were taking photos, posing in front of the Arbeit macht frei gate, their serious faces contrasting with their silly vacation clothes. A guide solemnly led a group of teenagers into the “Death court”, where prisoners were executed; as he went on with his explanations the ice of respectfulness started melting at the margins of the group, someone pushed, another giggled. Nearby people went into the notorious barrack 11, to see the cellars where the Gestapo tortured its victims and starved them to death, their faces showing this mixed expression of shock and avidity that people have when they visit torture museums. And then I smelled it – a distinct smell of burning flesh, no, I thought, this cannot be, they can’t possibly be doing that, they can’t possibly go into such extremes of bad taste, and I guess it really was a poor coincidence, a pollution cloud from some factory or fire in a nearby field or bad odours from the cafeteria kitchen, but it is evident that one day, in another 60 years maybe, there will be artificial burning-flesh smell in Auschwitz, and the eerie cells of barrack 11 will be made even more eerie by screaming sounds and tortured wax figures, and visitors will be greeted by guards in SS uniform, and it will all be one huge horror museum, a real Auschwitz Dungeon. For there will inevitably come a time when people will feel for the victims of the Holocaust what we feel for the victims of the Black Plague, when they will pity the prisoners of barrack 11 as we pity the prisoners of the Tower of London, when they will be as appalled by the burning of Jewish women as we are by the burning of witches. This will not take ages, in fact it has already begun, already in the old city of Cracow I picked up brochures promoting “special offers”, day trips to “Auschwitz-Birkenau, the biggest cemetery in the world”, or tours where you can “see Auschwitz and the salt mines in one day”.

            And there is no one to blame, it is simply inevitable, for my generation the Holocaust still meant grandparents and neighbours but for the next one it will be a historical abstraction; at least that way people will know that Auschwitz is not an abstraction, that it is a day-trip distance from Cracow, that you can see it and the salt mines in a single day, that it is not situated in the realm of evil but between fields and houses, at the outskirts of a banal, ugly industrial town; that the famous railroad leading to the “Death Gate” of Birkenau does not really originate in our nightmares and ends in a photograph. There is something very strong about a road sign to Auschwitz; Jonathan Littell (he’s not the first of course) tries to create this effect all the time, to de-mythicise the Holocaust and put it back to earth, a thing of flesh and shit and blood.

            But all these thoughts came later and that day I just felt frustrated, as angry as 18 years before at my inability to be moved by a visit to that place. Everything seemed like an awful cliché, I just wanted to get away from there, to stop my parents from talking in pompous phrases, to find a real feeling and hang on to it. As we headed on to Sosnowiec we called my grandmother, to ask her if she remembers the name of the street my grandfather lived at.

            “How can she remember,” said my mother while we waited for her to pick up the phone, “she didn’t know him at the time, they met during the war”.

            But she did remember. Vaguely, it is true, but somehow the name Dekerta came up to her mind. Apparently they came back after the war to see if someone from his family survived. No one did, and a Polish family was living at the house, so they went back to Warsaw.

            We entered “Dekerta St., Sosnowiec” into the GPS. It was listed, and the computer indifferently calculated an itinerary, as if it was just any other street.

            The town of Sosnowiec is not a pretty sight. Indeed it is one of the most depressing places I have ever seen. Gray apartment blocks, rusting tramways, people who all look like they’ve been fired from a steel factory. A modern shopping mall in the city center somehow just added to the miserable aspect of it all. Behind this mall was Dekerta Street.

            Immediately I knew that my grandmother was right. In the midst of this post-communist Polish industrial town, small Dekerta Street survived with its Austro-Hungarian facades, between the new shopping mall and a pedestrian shopping street where a few drunkards were idling by. Most of the once-beautiful facades were now dilapidated, and the inner courtyards were shabby and unwelcoming. Almost no one passed by, and for a long time we stood there, trying to imagine which house it was. What is certain is that each and every one of these houses once had Jewish families living in it. You could feel memory hanging on this street like a cloud which wouldn’t dissipate. Here, finally, the void became presence.

            Only on the highway to Cracow did my mother remember.

            “We forgot to go to the cemetery,” she said, almost crying. “The Jewish cemetery. It must still be there.”

            But we hurried to get to Cracow, and my grandfather’s family continued to rest in the abandoned Jewish cemetery, in a town where no Jews are left, without even a short visit from their Israeli descendants who passed there almost by accident and will certainly never come back again.

Just wanted to say thanks for posting this here, Nir.  Very much looking forwards to reading the book.