The air is crisp. Leaves crackle beneath the feet of passersby and warm rays of afternoon sun from a storybook Polish sky play across the ruins of the crematorium.

It feels like I could be viewing the glorious remains of a temple in Athens instead of the site of the largest mass murder in modern history: the former German Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau.

It didn’t feel like it.

I stare dumbly at the towering concrete monument to the victims, grasping nothing. I’m unmoved by seeing the relics preserved behind glass. I know over a million people were killed here, mostly Jews, just for being Jews, but I still can’t relate.

Amidst the swarm of visitors I walk in the footsteps of prisoners, trying to establish some tangible connection with the place. If the long morning tour I’d had in Auschwitz didn’t do it, I doubt that wandering around Birkenau, a satellite death camp opened a year after the Auschwitz labor camp, will make much more of an impact.

I shuffle past an eerie pond surrounded by a few commemorative plaques. l learn that the ashes of thousands are in that pond, dumped there by the Nazis who murdered victims in mass, burning their bodies after sending them to the gas chambers.

I pass the ruins of a crematorium, and find myself walking among endless rows of rectangular piles of rubble; remnants of the “Canada” storehouses for property stolen from murdered victims. The Nazis burned them to the ground in a desperate attempt to destroy evidence of the camp.

Suddenly, a glint from below catches my eye and I notice an odd, thin object poking out of the dirt. Bending over, I pry loose a rusty, broken spoon. I glance around to confirm my solitude and kneel handling a utensil whose history may hold endless possibilities.

The ladle is completely broken off; jagged. What remains is rough, blackened, and scratched. A simple design, an indentation following the curve of the utensil, is engraved into the edges.

I study it.

Auschwitz-Birkenau, a symbol of the Holocaust and the worst that man is capable of, has been combed over by historians for decades. This spoon was probably left by a careless tourist or worker, or maybe some teenagers in the ’60s who dared each other to camp out in the ruins of an old Nazi storehouse for the night, afraid of ghosts.

But what if…

What if it was confiscated from a new prisoner who had thought he was on his way to a new home?

What if it belonged to a young man scared of death, working 18 hours a day with bloody feet, or someone too tired to be afraid?

Perhaps it was dropped by a sick middle-aged European man worked to near death, on his way to the gas chamber, no longer in need of a spoon.

I remember one week earlier, I visited Buchenwald concentration camp, just five miles outside of the bustling little town of Weimar.

Buchenwald was the largest concentration camp in Germany from 1937 until its liberation in 1945; hundreds of thousands of people were killed there. Though it began as a place for political prisoners, many Gypsies, Jews, and others were sent there as time went on.

On Ettersberg Hill stands the Buchenwald National Memorial, a colossal sprawl spanning the size of at least four football fields. To navigate this is at least a 35-minute ordeal. I stood at the start of it, facing a large gray concrete plaque with stoic sculptures depicting suffering, laboring men in solidarity, with proud officials looking on.

Descending a long stairway, were six more structures with similar scenes, reminiscent of the Stages of the Cross. The last depicted a triumphant group of men who had overthrown the Nazi guards. Buchenwald was one of the few major camps where prisoners rebelled in the days preceding liberation by units of the U.S. Army.

Back in Auschwitz, I turn the broken spoon over in my hands, shaking off the dust and dirt which has accumulated. My mind hearkens back in time and I see a Nazi guard sitting smugly with his meal, spooning heaps of steaming soup into his mouth as he glances, bored, over the camp, unaware of the plans of dissident prisoners.

About seven hundred prisoners tried to escape Auschwitz. Three hundred were successful. The rest were executed. Anyone who attempted escape was responsible for the forced starvation of their families as well as the shooting of ten prisoners selected randomly– the Nazis’ way of making an example.

I picture emaciated men, huddling in their barracks, planning an ill-fated escape, spooning their last taste of diluted soup into their mouths – their last taste of anything, perhaps.

I think of their families, starving to death as punishment for their loved one’s attempt at maintaining their will to live. I shudder.

It brought me back to the Buchenwald camp where we were prompted to think critically about the monument. “What do you think?” we were asked by Cologne University professor Martin Jander, “Does this monument do justice to what happened at Buchenwald?”

One exchange student, Chloe Kernaghan of Guam, looked at the awkward display and replied, “I don’t think they would want to be remembered like this. It seems really… disconnected from the actual situation.”

In the Buchenwald camp, we continued down the “Street of Nations,” winding past eighteen large blocks commemorating each nation’s victims. Behind them stood a massive bell tower, which sounded a boom on the hour, every hour.

In Auschwitz, I remember this bell tower. I imagine its mighty ring as a new set of inmates is ushered through the camp gates, their belongings taken away and thrown into storage piles.

I remember the glass cases full of confiscated shoes, eyeglasses, and spoons – like the one I was holding in my hand. I remember the mother who fed her baby with this spoon; the father who bought this as part of a set.

I turn the rusty spoon over in my hand. It doesn’t impose on me a hero or a victim. It could have belonged to anyone.

And yet, after endless hours of being herded in and out of museums and monuments, the reality hit me. People were slaughtered and kept to die on these grounds, and it was finally real to me. Now, I felt the people who met their end there. All it took was a spoon.

Holocaust Encyclopedia

Auschwitz- Birkenau Photo Essay