Listen here.
As you walked down the road from the town of Oswiecim to the former concentration camp, on the left was a park filled with trees and long, soft grass, and a gently-moving river, and little fingers of sunlight reaching through the misty early morning air.
You would think it was quite pretty if you didn't know what had happened here.
Maybe 300m on from the previous picture, there was a stark reminder - concrete wall with barbed wire and watchhouse. There were flocks of swallows playing in the air just above the barrack building at the right.
The archway through which so many hundreds of thousands of poor souls entered into Auschwitz II Birkenau - many got off the trains which had transported them to be taken straight to the gas chambers.
Once inside there was very little hope of escape - high barbed-wire fences, which would have been well-lit at night, and a watch-tower every couple of hundred metres. You can see the rows of barrack-houses to the left, behind the barbed wire.