An honest answer to a question most travel writers won’t touch
Everyone has a list of places they want to go. The list grows with every documentary watched, every friend’s Instagram story, every late-night rabbit hole down Google Maps. Mine is long and slightly unrealistic and brings me genuine joy to think about.
But this isn’t that list.
This is about the other one. The place I have thought about, read about, and quietly, consistently decided I do not want to see with my own eyes. Not because I don’t respect it. Not because I think it’s unimportant. But because I think some places carry a weight that I am not sure I am equipped to hold.
For me, that place is Auschwitz.
Let Me Explain — Because It Needs Explaining
I want to be careful here, because I am aware of how this sounds.
Auschwitz-Birkenau, the former Nazi concentration and extermination camp in southern Poland, is one of the most visited memorial sites in the world. Over two million people go every year. Historians, educators, survivors’ families, students, world leaders. People who go describe it as a necessary pilgrimage — a confrontation with the worst of what human beings have done to each other, and a commitment to remembering.
I understand that. I believe in that. I think bearing witness matters, and I think places like Auschwitz exist precisely so that we cannot look away.
And yet.
“There are places that don’t ask you to visit them. They ask you to be ready.”
I don’t think I am ready. And I’m not sure I ever will be.
What I’m Actually Afraid Of
I have read about Auschwitz. I have watched documentaries, read testimonies, studied the history. I know the numbers — though “knowing” numbers like 1.1 million feels like a category error, a place where arithmetic fails completely.
What I am afraid of is not the history. It is the gap between knowing something and standing inside it.
I am afraid of walking through the gate — the one with the iron letters that say Arbeit Macht Frei, Work Sets You Free, a lie so cynical it still takes your breath away — and finding that I don’t feel enough. That I will stand in a place of unimaginable suffering and be somehow inadequate to it. That my grief will feel small and performative compared to what the ground itself remembers.
I am also afraid of the opposite: that I will feel too much. That it will break something open in me that I won’t know how to close again.
Both fears feel real. And I have never quite resolved them.
The Tourism Question
There is a complicated conversation happening around Holocaust memorial sites — around the ethics of visiting, of photographing, of what it means to turn a site of mass murder into a destination.
I don’t have a clean answer to that. I think the people who go with reverence and intention are doing something important. I think the people who go carelessly — who take selfies at the rail tracks, who treat it like a box to check on a European itinerary — are doing something that I find genuinely difficult to understand.
But I also think there is a version of not going that is its own form of respect. A recognition that you are not yet the person who can receive what that place has to offer. That you would be going for the wrong reasons, or with too little of yourself to give to it.
That is where I am. Maybe permanently. Maybe not.
What I Do Instead
I read. I watch. I listen to the testimonies of survivors — the ones recorded in the last decades of their lives, the ones where elderly men and women speak in careful, precise language about things that should be impossible to describe with language at all.
I think about a woman named Primo Levi, who survived Auschwitz and spent the rest of his life writing about it with a clarity that feels almost unbearable. He once wrote that the worst thing about survival was the shame — not his own guilt, but the shame of bearing witness to what human beings were capable of. Of having seen it and lived.
Reading that, I felt something I couldn’t name. Not quite guilt. Not quite grief. Something closer to the awareness of a debt I don’t know how to repay.
The Honest Part
I think, if I am fully honest, there is something else underneath all of this.
I live a comfortable life. I travel for pleasure. I eat well and sleep in good beds and worry about things that would have been invisible luxuries to the people who were taken to that place. And some part of me feels that to visit Auschwitz as a tourist — camera in bag, return ticket in pocket — would be to bring all of that comfort into a space where comfort is a kind of insult.
I know that’s not entirely rational. I know that people with comfortable lives visit and are changed by it. I know the memorial exists specifically to be visited.
But I am trying to be honest here, not rational. And honestly, I am not sure I have earned the right to stand there yet. I am not sure what earning that right would even look like.
Maybe it would look like becoming someone who thinks more carefully about the world. Someone who takes history more seriously. Someone who has done enough — in small, private ways — to feel that their presence at such a place would be an act of witness rather than an act of tourism.
I’m not there yet.
There are places in the world that ask something of you before you arrive. Not a ticket, not a travel plan — something harder to name. A kind of readiness. A willingness to be undone.
I believe Auschwitz is one of those places. And I believe, for now, that the most honest thing I can do is admit that I am not ready to be undone by it.
Maybe one day that will change. Maybe the right version of this story ends with me standing at that gate, finally prepared to receive what it has to say.
But not yet.
Not yet.
Travel & Reflection · April 12, 2026 · 7 min read
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