The rumors started even before we got there. The soldiers coming from the north spoke of a place where the stench of death was so thick it clung to the skin. They said it wasn't just a camp; it was an abyss. I thought nothing in the war could surprise me anymore. I was wrong.
When we finally reached the place, the air felt different, heavy, as if the very environment knew what had happened there. In the distance, you could see the iron gates with words written in German that I couldn't understand. Later, someone translated it for me: "Work sets you free."
Crossing those gates felt like stepping into another world, a world where humanity had ceased to exist. The wooden barracks were empty, but the smell lingered — a mixture of burned bodies and despair.
Hans was no longer with me, but his words came back like a blow: "The earth holds everything: the dead, the living, the secrets." I looked at the ground beneath me, cracked and dry, as if it too had been tortured.
Inside, there was too much evidence for anyone to deny what had happened. Piles of clothes, shoes, glasses. Objects that told stories no one could tell anymore. The people who had used them had been reduced to ashes, but their presence remained, etched into every detail.
A soldier beside me murmured in horror:
— They were just people…
I remained silent. What was there to say? People. Men, women, children. Broken, emptied, burned. The war called them enemies. The machine turned them into numbers.
I walked into a room where the ceiling still bore black stains. The makeshift guide explained that this was where the gas was released. I looked at the floor and imagined myself there, surrounded by strangers, all waiting for the end without understanding how life had turned into this.
— There is no hell worse than this — I whispered, more to myself than to anyone else.
One of the soldiers started crying, his rifle falling from his hands. Others just stared, unable to process it. There was no preparation for this.
When we left, I sat near a barbed wire fence and looked at the horizon. Everything was quiet now. Almost ironic. In that place of horrors, peace felt insulting.
At that moment, I understood something terrible: war is a crime, yes, but what had happened there was something beyond. War had allowed it, but men had turned it into something worse. They hadn't just killed bodies; they had killed ideas, hopes, meanings.
I thought of Hans, who believed the earth was tired of us. Maybe he was right. Because in that place, I felt for the first time that humanity wasn't a privilege but a burden. And, standing before that camp, there was no escaping the truth: we destroy ourselves not because we have to, but because we choose to.
When we returned to the front, I carried with me the stench of that place, the weight of what I had seen. The war had taken many things from me, but on that day, it took something greater. It stole my belief in the future. Because if we were capable of that, what would stop us from doing something even worse?