Closer look at a concentration camp

We have seen Auschwitz in the movies, the iconic strip of trees or the railway tracks on which the camp was built for sheer ease of transporting people to a desolate and deadly place.

We share a trepidation of visiting this death camp.

But being there was a lighter experience than my family and I had anticipated.

The sheer expansiveness of the camp is overwhelming.

The row upon row upon row of fragile wooden bungalows offered little if any insulation from the bitter cold of winter, and, of course, from the gas chambers.

These chambers are not at a discreet distance from the bungalows. They are adjacent to them.

We left Auschwitz pleased that we had visited the site, but relieved that ours was a superficial visit.

We could have exposed our children to images of skeletal children with shaven heads and mass graves.

Instead, we spent our last remaining minutes listening to a Scotsman paying tribute to all those who had died and those who survived.

A gentle breeze carries the beautiful and mournful Amazing Grace played on bagpipes across the camp.

The history still moves us to tears but makes us determined to ensure that our children are compassionate, brave and strong, and that theirs is a generation in which such horrors are only the stuff movies are made of.