Kazimierz is the Jewish quarter of Kraków, in southern Poland. You might know it from Schindler’s List, which was filmed here and has given the district a nickname: Jewrassic Park. The remains of a pastiche of the Płaszów concentration camp, built for the movie, are in a limestone quarry nearby. YouTubers record themselves there, staring at pieces of barbed wire. It’s odd that Steven Spielberg felt the need to dump another concentration camp on Poland. Perhaps it is an expression of control.

These days, people like to say “Never Again for Anyone.” It’s an amendment to the oath “Never Again,” which was first used by liberated inmates in Buchenwald and later by the far-right rabbi Meir Kahane. I’m not sure people are particularly dedicated to the principles of “Never Again” here. Mostly they are eating. I stand outside the Ariel restaurant, on the square. The restaurant plays Jewish-style music, serves Jewish-style food, and is decorated as a lost Jewish home, with green walls, wooden floors, and a chandelier.

There is a toy Jew on a shelf. He is perhaps four inches high, and he carries a large coin in his hand: if the coin were scaled up with him, it would be the size of a sombrero. This is the Lucky Jew, a Polish good-luck charm said to bring financial benefits. You can buy a Lucky Jew in Kraków or, if you prefer, a cuddly dragon. They are equally mythical. I like them, or rather, I don’t mind them. There were 3.3 million Jews in Poland in 1939 and as few as 4,500 today; the chief rabbi of Poland is an American, which is a kind of surrender. To muster prewar numbers, you’d have to count the toy Jews as the Jews of Poland. To be a toy is a kind of destiny. Nothing is more pliant, more willing to accept its fate, than a toy.

On the walls I find nineteen paintings of Jews counting money, and this is the restaurant for people who think they like Jews. There is also a pair of beatific horses: they look like the Virgin might if she were a horse. The Jews, though, look fuzzily demonic: they are counting notes or coins, though one is examining an egg, as if on holiday from avarice. I eat here often, sometimes alone, and once with a woman I encounter crying outside the Remuh Synagogue on Friday night. The service is canceled because there is no minyan: you need ten men to hold a service, and there are not ten to be found.

I say “shalom” to a group of German men too loudly. They look like Vikings. I am not just saying that. They respond like the first-night audience for Springtime for Hitler: with a silence so profound it’s functionally a noise. It seems they don’t want to talk to a live Jew in the Jew-themed café. It’s as if the real Donald Duck turned up at Disneyland, and they seek only the Donald Duck of their imagination. I try to be interesting, a Jew that walked off a shelf. When the band plays Jewish music, I sing along and bang the table. I am a tourist attraction, and I am filmed.

I am a British Jew, and I have been taught that the real Jewish world is here, except it isn’t. This terrible café is here. My grandmother’s family is from Łódz, some two hundred fifty kilometers northwest, and she lived uneasily in Britain, a country that did not belong to her. When I was a child, I remember her singing about a baby drowning in the bath. Perhaps I am the same. I am uneasy, too. Anti-Semitism is rampaging, making up for its rest, but there is a contradiction that interests me: the ever-expanding glut of Holocaust memorials.

In Britain, the government plans a vast Holocaust memorial near Parliament, though Britain has no complicity beyond preventing Jewish escape to Palestine. The design looks like dinosaur bones, or a toast rack, and if it has anything to do with Jewish people, I cannot see how. It seems, rather, unconsciously related to Britain’s imperial crimes, which are more rarely mentioned in our public discourse: Is this Jew washing? I wonder if memorialization is a mirror in which you see only your own reflection so that you do not have to look into the past at all.

Some of the best-selling books about the Shoah are John Boyne’s The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, which is not about a Jew, and the diary of Anne Frank, which is not about the Shoah. The Zone of Interest is about the Shoah, but a Shoah stripped of Jews. Instead, the film is about aesthetics—the Birkenauesque—and consumer goods. That these exist in a world of mass murder seems a surprise to the filmmaker, but then again, he did grow up in late-capitalist London. Perhaps he does not understand that the Martin Amis novel on which the film is slightly based is satire, or that he made Franz Liebkind’s Springtime for Hitler before Max Bialystock turned it into a musical comedy.

Holocaust memorials are as myriad as Jew hate, and for this reason I have a vague idea that there is something wrong with them. So here I am, down my grandmother’s existential plughole, in a Jewish home with no warmth.

Since the Nineties, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, there has been a “Jewish Renaissance” in Poland. In Kazimierz there is a Jewish Community Centre, a Centre for Jewish Culture, a Jewish Culture Festival, and a small Jewish community. The Orthodox, designated keepers of the synagogues and cemeteries, admit no Jew born outside Poland to their community, though they welcome Orthodox visitors, including Israelis. I join them at the Remuh Synagogue on the square. They double the Jewish population of Kraków for an hour and look doubly alienated for their trouble.

The Jewish Community Centre admits those with one Jewish grandparent—Poland is filled with oblivious, partial, or newly awakened Jews—and even has a preschool. Then there is Chabad, which welcomes all Jews (so long as they are men). I went to the Chabad synagogue but left when I was invited to sit in a hallway by a blank wall. You can love a lost Jewish world, but it doesn’t always love you back. My companion is luckier. He does not sit in the hall. He buys a jar of pickles, which he carries across Poland like a charm: Leo Bloom’s blue blanket.

There were more rescuers (the “Righteous”) in Poland than anywhere else, but there were collaborators and murderers, too. On July 10, 1941, before Jedwabne was occupied, village men locked their Jewish neighbors in a barn and burned it down; a monument erected in 1963 blamed the Germans. In 2001, the publication of Jan T. Gross’s Neighbors, an account of this massacre, offended Poland’s self-image. That same year, the Polish president Aleksander Kwasniewski apologized for Jedwabne. But the current president, Andrzej Duda, has called this kind of penitence “an attempt to destroy Poland’s good name.” The right-wing Law and Justice Party, which came to power in 2015, instigated a campaign against historians and museum directors who did not push the narrative of Polish martyrdom, and in 2018 passed a law that tried to prohibit accusing Poles or Poland of crimes committed by the Germans. At this time, only a brave Polish academic might note the Kielce pogrom of 1946, in which forty-two Jewish survivors were murdered. Last year, however, the Law and Justice Party lost its majority, and the new government, led by the centrist prime minister Donald Tusk, a former president of the European Council whose previous tenure as prime minister lasted from 2007 to 2014, has less time for wars over memory. At an event at the real Płaszów concentration camp in March, local dignitaries did not diminish the number of Jewish dead.

I meet Jakub Nowakowski at the Galicia Jewish Museum. He is a Catholic born in Kazimierz. Jakub’s mother spoke words of Yiddish and Hebrew to him that she learned from her own mother, who had Jewish neighbors as a child. He did not know where they came from until later because people did not talk about Jews.

“We’ve pushed quite strongly to rewrite the story that we created about ourselves,” says Nowakowski. “To talk not only about the Righteous but about those Jews that were betrayed. We’ve pushed so far, in a very short time, deconstructing this glorious story of the Poles that it created genuine confusion and sorrow.”

“Who is the most famous among the Righteous?” he asks me. Oskar Schindler? “Schindler,” he repeats. “It’s bloody insane, but the most famous Righteous is a bloody German.” “You have thousands of Polish Righteous who are risking far more in a far more horrible situation.” The Ulmas of Markowa—Józef and Wiktoria, and their six children—were caught hiding Jews in 1944. They were likely betrayed by a Pole, and the family was shot. The Ulma Family Museum of Poles Saving Jews (From Other Poles) in World War II opened in 2016.

Poland’s trauma sometimes mutates into something that feels like a Mel Brooks film. Nowakowski was once approached by a man who claimed to be from the town with the last surviving synagogue in the Polish highlands. “The man says, ‘We are going to do a museum of the Righteous from our village.’ ” Nowakowski replied, “Great idea! Let’s do a quick check of how many of them there were from your village.” He asks me—how many? “Zero!” he shouts. “How many of them from the neighboring village?” He pauses. “One!’’

Once, he says, during the Jewish Culture Festival, a Shabbat service was oversubscribed and eighty Poles waited at the door. An Israeli group that had reserved seats was admitted. Some Poles were angry. “You just told us there was no room in the museum,” he says, mimicking the group. “You’re lying! You’re lying! You care only about yourselves, you Jews! We are bloody Poles in bloody Poland, and we have a right to be in this Jewish Shabbat service!”

I tour the ghetto. I meet a guide there, slender and gentle. He shows me a memorial to the liquidation of the ghetto, which is made up of empty chairs: a morbid furniture shop in the rain. “When two nations, two religions live in one home,” he says, “or used to live in one home, especially two nations which consider themselves the chosen ones”—he laughs—“Jews, who are the chosen ones, and Poles, who have this nationalistic Polish idea of being the Jesus of Nations because we always suffer. ‘We are more chosen!’ ‘No, we suffered more!’ ” I always thought my ability to suffer was peculiarly Jewish. Now I think it is peculiarly Polish-Jewish, and for the first time in Poland, I feel at home, with the suffering.

That night I find a woman in the square; she is from the north of England, an accidental tourist. “It’s so sad here,” she says, clutching her finery as if it is her disappointment. I feel for her. Her travel agent didn’t tell her it is haunted.

I meet Janusz Makuch at the Cheder café: a warm, excitable man. He founded the Jewish Culture Festival in 1988. He tells me that the Law and Justice Party loved to build monuments and museums. “They love to emphasize the Righteous. Poles saved millions of Jews!” He says this in a silly voice. “The Poles, the Poles, the Righteous people—know what I mean?”

I ask him: What’s wrong with Shoah memorialization? He is quiet for a long time. “I don’t see the truth in it,” he says eventually. “People don’t want to know the truth.” He is right. The Jew in The Boy in the Striped Pajamas, Boyne’s fairy tale of Auschwitz, reads more like a Christ Child than any Jewish child I have met: Where is his anxiety? The Zone of Interest chooses an aesthetic without Jews. Sometimes the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum recommends against using certain artworks in the classroom: Boyne’s book, for instance. Boyne has said that he strives to keep the Shoah in the public consciousness, as if it were a brand that could endure but with his help.

“You can do whatever you want,” Makuch says eventually. “You can try and rebuild this world over here. It’s done. I wish all my best to the people who live here, who want to build a Jewish future, who want to recreate Jewish society. It’s done. You have the klezmer musicians, you have the Jewish restaurants, you have the waiters with the yarmulkes and the this and the that. More of this shit you have, more painfully you understand”—and he looks at me—“we are living in its absence.”

He says, “We show up, we build something, we put the exhibition in the museum, and our conscience, our sense of guilt, is clean. We did something.” Then he pauses and whispers angrily: “No. We did nothing! What about our children, our educational system—what about our church?” The Catholic Church did absolve the Jews as a whole of killing Christ, the foundational myth of Jew hate—in 1965. “What about the Poles who still live in the Jewish houses?”

He continues: “The official Polish narrative sounds like this: we lived together almost one thousand years. The good and the bad.” He whispers fiercely. “We’ve never lived together, you motherfucker. We lived side by side. Jews didn’t pay attention to the Poles. The Poles didn’t pay attention to the Jews. Every anti-Semite has to have his own Jew to love. The rest to the gas. I have only one dream now. I want to live in Israel.” As I leave, he offers me advice: “Don’t try to generalize, don’t try to find only one key to understand it. It’s too complicated. There are a lot of doors to this shtetl called Poland.”

The next morning, I hail a golf cart labeled ghetto. Inside it is a British man called Alex. He says, in a strong northern English accent, that I can interview him about being a tour guide if I give him fifty euros. He is jocular. If I had to guess, I would say he is a failed comic. I ask him why he thinks tourists come here. “People love other people’s misery,” he replies. He mimics them: “ ‘Why did they kill all the Jews, why did they kill all the Jews?’ ”

Alex has an idea. He falls on it like a dog with a balloon. “The Jews controlled everything,” he says. “They had all the businesses, but they had worked for it—it wasn’t given to them.” If they controlled everything, I say, wouldn’t it be quite hard to kill them? “Not everything,” he admits, “but financially. . . . They put themselves higher than the locals, which also got on people’s nerves. I’m just giving different reasons, not that I totally agree.”

He once was a tour guide at Auschwitz. “I used to love my job there. I used to love the customers. I used to stand people behind the fence and say, ‘Look, have you ever seen the film The Boy in the Striped Pajamas? This is what it would be like.’ I do all the stuff on my tours, what the other tours don’t do, and that’s break barriers, yeah, so people really understand something,” he says gaily. “They understand it from different angles, from both sides—not just the Jews count, they’re not that kind themselves.”

“Some people want reenactments,” he explains. He goes on: “I used to grab hold of people and say, ‘Imagine having your wife dragged off you like this and just thrown to one side.’ I used to stand people in a line sometimes and say, ‘Welcome to Auschwitz. Take your clothes off.’ ” What about that line now? “They’d be like, ‘Wot?’ ”

“Kraków is a nice place,” he says, “but without Auschwitz being here, it wouldn’t be that big hit.” What have you learned about Jewish people here? He laughs. “They’re not really welcome! Ha-ha!” Why do people go to Auschwitz? “They enjoy it! The problem,” he continues, “was the place turned into a holiday like Euro Disney, and that’s what put me off.” That’s what put you off? “It really killed the atmosphere of how it should look. It just killed everything. The tourist machine actually killed Auschwitz.” He looks sorrowful. I think about Alex often, and I think he is right.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camp is near the town of Oświȩcim at two different confluences: of trans-European railway lines and of the rivers Soła and Vistula. The Jews came in on the railways and went out in the rivers, which flow to the Baltic Sea. Auschwitz is the German name for Oświȩcim. After the war, the Germans left and the Soviets arrived, and the Poles ultimately decided that the death camp should keep its German name, and that seems fair.

I travel to Auschwitz twice for this article. The first time, I take a tour bus from Kraków. The sound system plays the theme song from Friends.

The second time I take the train.

I meet a taxi driver at the station. “The whole world knows this as a concentration camp,” he says, “and not as a beautiful town. The tourist buses bring people straight from Kraków—they don’t go to the castle. I live five minutes from here. There is a waterfall.” When I get into a taxi the following day and say, “Extermination camp,” the driver sighs and repeats, not unkindly, “Extermination camp.” When, another day, I get into a taxi and say, “Extermination camp”—as if I am in a play and my only line is “extermination camp”—he looks at me sympathetically, his face creased with concern. Then he begs me to go to a theme park called Energylandia, which has a Frutti Loop coaster, a Mars coaster, and something called The Viking. Oświȩcim is also very good at ice hockey. No one cares.

The town is set around an ancient square with fountains that are lit with purple lights at night, and children splash in the water. Beyond that are ring roads, a glossy mall with a KFC, and a McDonald’s, whose similarity to every other McDonald’s is soothing. It feels idle in summer, becalmed: like something is missing. The whole of Poland feels as if something is missing, as if it has sprouted from some great, unexcavated sorrow.

We wander about. Berka Joselewicza Street—the old Jew Street—is deserted: the site of the Great Synagogue is now a sullen park. The first Jewish cemetery, founded in 1588, is missing. No one knows where it is, though sometimes people renovate their houses and find Jewish matzevot in the walls and floors. Eventually we find the resident Jew. He is a figure six inches tall and stands in a shop window. Perhaps this is the rational ending to the Jewish story in Europe: Does a six-inch Jew control a six-inch world? His owner waves at me through the glass. I can’t bring myself to go in to ask—how much is that Jew in the window? I wave back. We find a mural of a cartoon Pope John Paul II on a wall near an ice cream shop. His expression is neutral. His speech bubble says: “Antysemityzm jest grzechem przeciw bogu i ludzkosci.” (“Anti-Semitism is a sin against God and humanity.”) We find the Castle Museum with its tableaux of prewar life and its collection of prewar sports equipment, including hockey sticks, tableware, and alarming dolls.

When I inquire into Jewish life, they wave me toward the Oshpitzin Jewish Museum with something like relief, though I stay long enough to score a goal in their ice hockey exhibit, which thrills me. The Jewish Museum is attached to a small synagogue renovated with funds from the Diaspora. I have never seen such a pristine synagogue, but then it has no congregation: it feels like a theater whose actors have left. It is attached to the house of the last Jew of Oświȩcim, Szymon Kluger, who died in 2000. In his honor, it is now a hipster café: pale wood, board games, exotic teas, badges for sale that say coexist. I slowly eat a bagel and think, Isn’t it a little late for that? Kluger’s house exists in carefully preserved remnants related to portals: an old door mounted on a wall, the imprint of a mezuzah on a doorway. But he couldn’t leave. He tried.

In the museum, I meet Artur, a grave and studious man. When he grew up in Oświȩcim, he says, local history was “empty, like a blank page. I’m sure many people don’t want to talk about it, want to forget it. A small group tried to revive the community, but they all left. Mostly because of anti-Semitism, they left the town.” He takes me into the synagogue and shows me a Torah. There are two: gifts from American Jewish groups, a glut. I ask if I can kiss the hem of the cover, and he permits it. It is so awkward an encounter that we might as well both be English.

Outside I find two young men sunning themselves on deck chairs. One is German; one grew up here. He left when he was seventeen. When I ask why he is here, at the Jewish museum, he says, “This is something super international.” I think he cannot name his yearning, but he tells me about his school days. “One day I asked about the camp and someone told me, ‘This is forbidden to talk about. You know, this is like the Voldemort name in Harry Potter.’ ” A schoolyard insult was to call someone Jew. “I remember people saying that if you stole cigarettes from someone or if you looked dirty. We were saying this to each other without even knowing what that means. If you ask for a pen and you don’t get the pen from a person, this person would say to you, ‘You fucking Jew.’ ”

I spend hours sitting in the Da Grasso pizzeria in the town square. It used to be a Jewish-owned house—the Herz Hotel—and Barbara Leibler, a descendant of the former owner, is petitioning the government for its return. I doubt she will get it: in 2021, the time limit for appealing restitution decisions was set at thirty years. I sit eating spaghetti pomodoro, watching the square as if it is a double-exposed photograph. Jews gathered here for deportation. Even so, Oświȩcim is my favorite place in Poland. It doesn’t try to be something it isn’t. It’s honest.

I know what Auschwitz looks like because I have seen X-Men: Apocalypse (2016), which is partially set here. But I am not prepared for how normal it appears. The buildings are red brick, laid out like a deck of cards. It has been said that there is no birdsong here, but that is a myth: they are noisy, busy with their fledglings. I have a recording of them, which I want to play for you. It feels too ordinary to be what it is, but that is conditioning: it is not real, it cannot be. It is bright, and it is windy.

Jerzy Putrament, a Communist, wrote a prophecy in 1948, when the Auschwitz museum was one year old. “I can imagine perfectly the sort of American tour by Cook,” he wrote.

“Do you know the largest extermination center in the world?” “Encounter hell!” Such tours would be divided into normal, tourist, and “special.” The special tours, for a suitable extra charge, would include the following: transport to the camp in boxcars (the last ten km) with 120 people in each car, a cattle drive with truncheons carried out by specially uniformed SS men.

Alex, my driver in Kraków, is Putrament’s tour guide from the future: at least he tried.

Putrament would appreciate the one-star reviews of Auschwitz on Tripadvisor, with which I am mildly obsessed. There are many complaints, not about its existence but its logistics. “I was so looking forward to this trip,” writes Mike from Pocklington. “What a letdown . . . No atmosphere . . . Sorry but very disappointed.” “Terrible waste of time!” writes Piotr from Warsaw, who complains about the queue. “I believe that the Management of the Museum should start thinking more about Customer Experience!”

People have always fought over Auschwitz. Auschwitz I, the concentration and later extermination camp, was established in a former army barracks. Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, which housed most of the gas chambers and crematoria, is two kilometers away. According to Jonathan Huener’s Auschwitz, Poland, and the Politics of Commemoration, 1945–1979, there were proposals to demolish Birkenau or to host a circus company or hogs on its grounds; there was also an attempt to portray Auschwitz as the nadir of capitalism, which would surprise the many capitalists murdered here. For the person in the Venetian ghetto who hung the sign from a roof terrace I walked past in December (never again for anyone), I imagine it’s a test, to paraphrase Howard Jacobson, that the Jews have flunked.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is quieter than it used to be. It’s been thirty-five years since Avraham Weiss, a rabbi from New York, attacked a Carmelite convent established in a former storehouse for Zyklon B—the pesticide used to murder Jews—on the grounds. John Paul II thwarted the Committee for the Protection of Carmelite Nuns and ordered the convent moved. The New York Times headline was irresistible: pope orders nuns out of auschwitz. The museum opened in 1947 under the control of the Ministry of Culture and Art, which built a museum of Polish martyrdom because it offered Poland a narrative it could bear: it did not want a looking glass with a reproachful Jew staring back. So they developed Auschwitz I as a museum of Polish agony and let the grass grow on Birkenau, and that is both better and worse.

When I first visit in the summer of 2021, at the entrance, there is an exhibition of photographs of the first inmates here: Polish political prisoners. There are parking lots and toilets—I see a boy sitting on the stairs staring at Tinder and a photograph of a thong with no woman attached, which feels apt—and a restaurant, which attempts to pose as a normal restaurant with ornamental jars of wheat on shelves. It sells overpriced ice cream: the Auschwitz-Birkenau markup. There is a fly in the salad dressing. The fly gets it. It has committed suicide.

My first tour is led by a youngish blonde wearing a cocktail dress in a salmon color—or perhaps peach—with silver sandals. She leads us around the exhibition, speaking in a monotone one note off brisk, with an expression stripped of all surprise. I can’t listen and take notes at the same time, so I can’t tell you most of what she said. But I can tell you that I hated her. I hated her for her ability to look in her wardrobe that morning and think: The salmon, then.

She takes us through the exhibits—the piles of pots and crutches, the shoes and human hair. I say, Does anyone ask about the hair? I think it should be buried, according to Jewish tradition. She replies: No one has complained, aside from the very observant. We are taken into Crematorium 1. I hang back: I do not want to go in. A middle-aged man looks back at me. It is obvious that he is faintly excited. “Are you coming?” he asks, and I do.

We take a shuttle bus to Birkenau. I obsess about the things that anchor it here and make it real: the common domestic-looking building at the back with a jaunty red roof (Google Maps tells me it manufactures quilts and stationery); the fine new access road; the shop that sells fridge magnets that say, quite pointedly for fridge magnets, auschwitz-birkenau: german death camp; and the topography. It was built on the edge of a village called Brzezinka: the descendants of the villagers want restitution. They have hung a sign near the entrance: from our demolished houses were built auschwitz-birkenau concentration camp. many of us have not received compensation so far. we are forgotten victims of world war ii.

People stare into huts, shading their eyes, seeking with a mad kind of hunger. I tell a woman, a survivor of Auschwitz, about this later, and she asks me: What are they looking for? I don’t know, though I sense that it is fictional. The child Magneto of the Marvel Universe? SS goblins? Our guide is mostly interested in toilets. (This is not uncommon: my guide in the Kraków Ghetto told me that he had the following exchange with a tourist at Auschwitz. “Did they get toilet paper?” “No.” “How did they clean their asses?” “With the hand.” “What hand?” “Left hand.” “Why left hand?” “With right they were eating mostly.” An American Jew once asked him, “Where were the lawyers?” He replied: “In the next train carriage.” I love American Jews.) In summary, our guide says the Jews had no toilets. They lost their humanity. Her message seems to be: hang on to your toilet.

I return. In summer, if you want to come before teatime (four o’clock), you must pay twenty-two dollars for a guided tour. First, there is a film, scored with sad Rhineland-style river-cruise music and featuring a deranged voice-over. “The ovens could burn the remains of over four thousand seven hundred people per day. . . . Escape was almost impossible. . . . What led to those millions of lives cut short on the other side of the fence? . . . Much is at stake. What choices will you make?” This script is yearning for the all-caps treatment. It is like being punched in a cartoon.

On my second visit, the tour guide is tidy. He looks like the villain in Terminator 2. He carries an umbrella with a flourish. He wears mirrored sunglasses: we can see ourselves reflected in them. His speech rattles, filling the air. A Polish family has brought a six-year-old boy. I wonder what he makes of it all. His mother says he is promised an ice cream at the end. She is wearing heart-shaped sunglasses.

There is a photograph of indistinct nude women being chased into a gas chamber. It is part of a famous series of photographs taken by the Sonderkommando—a group of prisoners, mainly Jews, forced to work in the gas chambers and crematoria—from the gas chambers and smuggled out by the Polish underground. I don’t think this photograph should be on display: a fat American man takes a photograph of it without looking at it, which seems to me typical. Someone has gone to the trouble to make a model of a gas chamber and crematorium complete with tiny Jews.

We are at the hair. It is roughly six feet high and sixty feet long. It is faded to the same color now and tightly knotted. It is a thing, and so a metaphor, though obliviously. A man says to me, “Nowhere in the world can you see such a big pile”—he holds his hands apart to demonstrate bigness—“of human hair.” His friend says, as if waiting for such a moment, “The hair is like a punch in the face.” The guide tells us not to take photographs. The fat American man takes one anyway. I ask him: Why did you take a photograph when you were told not to? “It’s more harrowing,” he says, too intently. His eyes are screwed up, as if he is somewhere else. He adds, “For later.”

The first Holocaust memorial was built amid the Shoah at Majdanek, where prisoners filled ornamental eagles with human ash and told the Nazis they were beautifying the site. (Jewish irony.) The monument here has no such spirit. I hate it. It looks like a supersize game of Jenga. Perhaps it is meant to mirror the two ruined crematoria it sits between—it resembles them—or the SS guardhouse it is level with. It seems to belong to them. I wonder if I am the first person to notice this. I wonder if I am mad. But I am not surprised. The Judenplatz Holocaust Memorial in Vienna looks like a spa. The title of Berlin’s Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe doesn’t mention the Nazis, so it is possible that idiots of the future might think German Jewry was abducted by space aliens.

Birkenau’s International Monument to the Camp Victims was dedicated in 1967, almost the midpoint of Soviet rule. The government held a design competition: the advert said, “This monument should not only be suggestive of martyrdom and struggle, but also of the brotherhood that arose in common suffering and struggle.” There were seven finalists, all of which were rejected. Instead, three of the teams worked together, were subject to political interference, and they made this. It is a compromise, and it has all the sullenness of compromise. There is something wonderful about it, though, a real Jewish joke. It is the Auschwitz-Birkenau typo. The plaques on the original monument had to be replaced because they overestimated the death count by two and a half million: Nazi spin.

Don’t ask me about this, says the guide, I don’t know anything about it. I like him for this, but he ruins it by telling us that the prisoners in the Sonderkommando “had quite a luxe life.” In the hut someone asks the inevitable toilet question: Could they use the toilet at night? (I don’t note the answer.) The guide complains about “inscriptions made by visitors who don’t know how to behave.” I look at them. The Levy family has scratched a Star of David near the entrance. I ask him: How, after the Shoah, do we still have anti-Semitism? I know it’s a stupid question. A better question, to paraphrase Hannah and Her Sisters, is: How can we not? He replies: “They [the Jews] hold themselves apart. In the Roman Empire, they had fifty gods. The Jews had one.”

Later, I return to Birkenau by myself. I have a small anxiety that I will not be admitted because I don’t have a ticket. But the gates are unguarded. I watch children run along the railway tracks toward the crematoria. The grass is so long and lush you can hear it move. I fantasize that it will be turned into a locked garden, which feels appropriate: give it back to God. Because there is no Jewish symbolism in the Birkenau monument: even a whole civilization didn’t merit it. There is some at Treblinka, whose memorial evokes the Western Wall, cracked open, but almost no one goes there, so perhaps it doesn’t matter.

Auschwitz, though, is too powerful to give to the Jews. I encounter a tourist who came to Poland for a river cruise and stayed for this. “I’m not disappointed,” she says. “It is horrific.” I no longer believe that Hitler lost the war, but Poland gives itself over to magical thinking. I daydream about time travel here and even finding a magician to bring them back. I mostly think that if you don’t know what a Jew is when you walk into Auschwitz-Birkenau, you still won’t know it when you walk out, and so whatever else it is, it is a memorial to nothing except logistics.

In Warsaw, we stay in the Old Town, which was largely destroyed after the Warsaw Uprising and rebuilt partly according to the landscapes of Bernardo Bellotto: a painting atop a massacre. Our hotel is a sixteenth-century townhouse with vast buttresses. Inside this painting I hallucinate. I imagine a procession bearing Catholic imagery crossing the square reciting the kaddish, though, to be fair, my Latin isn’t great. Last October, there was a march for Palestine here, and a Norwegian student carried a placard depicting a Star of David being tossed into a bin. The woman was interviewed, and she insisted that she is not anti-Jew. I wonder if she meant the toys.

We visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a gaudy tribute to Jewish life in Poland. Dariusz Stola, its former director, left when the Law and Justice Party refused to confirm his reappointment. Stola opposed the law that criminalized accusations of Polish complicity in the Shoah and mounted the exhibition Estranged: March ’68 and Its Aftermath, which noted parallels between twenty-first-century Poland and the anti-Jewish rhetoric of 1968 that led to the exodus of thirteen thousand surviving Polish Jews. I see Wilhelm Sasnal’s contemporary paintings: a woman drives past the gate to Birkenau, but she does not look at it. Sasnal also paints the Majdanek concentration camp with a single bicycle: a tourist’s bicycle.

In a monstrous storm, I meet the journalist Konstanty Gebert, an expert in comparative genocide, in his vast apartment in downtown Warsaw. I love his book-lined home because I have spent days inside Bellotto’s parallel reality, leaving only for POLIN and to see a Disney film at the Soviet Palace of Culture and Science, another parallel reality.

“The silence you are talking about,” he tells me, “isn’t exactly your favorite conversation topic. Poland lost the war. There was from the very beginning an extremely ambiguous relationship to the wartime past.” Lies sweep up nationalist votes—or they try. In 2018, Yair Lapid, now the leader of the Israeli opposition, used the phrase “Polish death camps,” which is outrageous. The former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki replied that there were “Jewish perpetrators,” and each Jew who survived only did so because they met a Pole. “If it were not deadly serious,” Gebert says, “it would actually be very funny. Both gentlemen are lying over the top of their head without even understanding what is it that they are lying about, and both have their public solidly behind them.” But there is hope for Polish memory. The new government has not put forward a historical policy, Gebert says. “They will leave it to the historians.”

“The one thing about suffering,” he adds, “is that it does not ennoble. This is a Christian fallacy. On a collective level, it does not ennoble. It makes you concentrate on your own pain and makes you callous and indifferent to the pain of others. This is what happened in Poland. But it didn’t happen only to Poland.”

Each party, he says, believes “the war was about us. Everything else was a footnote. Speak to the Serbs: the war was about the Serbs. Don’t even try talking to the Kurds. Essentially, world history is about Kurdish suffering.” The history is different, he says. “Their psychology is exactly the same as ours. We need to dwell on our suffering, because if we don’t, nobody else will, and all that blood will have been in vain.”

Gebert says, “We live in a bubble, from Britain to Warsaw. A rich, protected bubble. We just pretend we don’t realize it.” The real world is not here, he says, and he is right. The real world, he says, is Kyiv and Kabul, Be’eri and Rafah. “We have failed to understand that a world with an Auschwitz cannot be mended. The ambition of trying to make it good again is wrong. It detracts from the serious job of understanding. It happens each time. The wars over memory, the distortions—simply because a genocide leaves a hole in the heart of the world that cannot be filled.”

We bring the Chabad pickles with us: they have become a metaphor for our new Polish-Jewish life. Of course, we fuck up completely. On the train to Warsaw, my companion drops the jar, and the carriage, which is filled with beautiful young women, is choked with pickle smell, and they scream.