My phone murmured at 4:30 a.m. I stirred and rolled onto my back, scrolling with an index finger for any Sunday evening messages and pings from the United States. With as much surgical care as a hostel bunkroom allows, I extracted my clothes and toiletries from a cupboard and headed to the washroom as the abrupt crackle of a plastic bag garnered a retort of restless repositioning. After a hot shower and a second, more successful attempt at dormitory discretion, I moved briskly through the streets of Kraków to Główny train station. A bakery and a vending machine dispensed coffee, donuts, and a ticket to Oświęcim, the Polish name for the town rechristened as “Auschwitz” by the Nazis, a place-name that has since become a metonym for the Holocaust, genocide, and human evil. The 5:56 a.m. train slowly rumbled through Kraków’s prosaic suburbs and Silesia’s post-industrial burnout for nearly two hours before lurching to a final stop at the Oświęcim station, which had the forlorn air of faded, Communist modernism. After snapping a few photos, I found signs pointing to “Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau” and began walking.

Why did I opt for such an early arrival?

It was neither tourist pluck nor an effort to maximize time; instead, it had to do with the camp’s visitation policies. Due to its popularity, in recent years the museum has implemented an online reservation system that requires visitors to sign-up in advance for a free tour during the busy spring and summer months. When I checked a few weeks in advance, no English-speaking tours were available during my stay in Kraków. Two options remained: spending upwards of $60 for a tour with a private company (which includes roundtrip bus transportation from Kraków) or flying solo by arriving at the museum before 10 a.m., when visitors without tour reservations are admitted. Given my need for independence and flexibility, I chose the second option. I had also learned from online forums that the tour reservation policy only applies to Auschwitz while the significantly larger Birkenau camp, located two kilometers away, does not require tickets at all. I would still like to try a guided tour on a future trip for the sake of experience and comparison.

The walk from the train station to the Auschwitz I Museum led through a nondescript landscape of traffic circles, overpasses, and boxy buildings. A mixed-use business and industrial park on the edge of town hardly seemed the natural locale for “Auschwitz” and yet within a few hundred meters a zip-tied, Tyvek sign announced the entrance. A row of air-conditioned tour buses lined the parking lot; a small crowd of visitors shuffled around the entrance to join their tour groups. After picking up a ticket from a kiosk, relinquishing some spare British pounds for Polish złoty, and checking my bag, I passed through a security checkpoint and was pointed down an empty line for self-guided visitors as others waited to saddle up with remote headsets, which allow docents to speak in a normal tone of voice to large groups via microphone.

Emerging from the museum entrance gauntlet, which is located in the same building used to process and admit new prisoners from mid-1944 until the camp’s liberation by the Soviet army in January 1945, I felt a strange sense of arrival. The deathly brick barracks, the electrified barbed wire anchored to concrete posts, the Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Makes Freedom”) gate—images that I recognized from so many photographs now materialized before my eyes. I, too, irresistibly reached for my camera. My thirst for visual documentation, however, tended to slake itself on the museum signage around the camp—historical grounding for cloudy impressions of spectacle and sameness transmitted by the roving eye.

As I photographed a map of the camp and read a statement about its origin as a Polish army barracks initially reappropriated by the Nazis to house Polish prisoners, a group of Spanish-speaking high school students moved in and surrounded me. Their guide spoke clearly and crisply, naturally achieving what sounded like an appropriate tone of humble seriousness. After explaining their agenda for the day, he reminded the students that they were visiting a cemetery and to behave appropriately and refrain from taking silly pictures. Their silent attention tempted me to trail along with them. It might be due to the fact that it was a Monday morning early in the summer tourist season but the schizophrenic interplay of remembrance and selfie culture in Loznitsa’s documentary, Austerlitz (2016) bore little resemblance to the scenes I witnessed throughout the day aside from a few inadvisable t-shirt choices. Visitors seemed to meet the occasion, like the group of high school students, with quiet alertness. Rather than being held from a self-reflexive forty-five degree angle, camera phones tended to silently record museum text. It was a relief to see “tactful” engagement as the norm. It also made my task more challenging: with no immediate fish to shoot in a barrel, the question of what it meant to visit Auschwitz posed itself without distraction.

My initial moments in the camp were like visiting a sprawling museum for the first time: map fumbling, a myopic focus on displays closest at hand, the movement of vaporous crowds teasing where “there” might be. Just beyond the gate and the barbed wire fence, a sign printed in Polish, English, and Hebrew indicated where the bodies of prisoners killed while trying to escape were displayed along Block 24 to terrorize the other inmates. Now, the space was vacant. An empty guard tower loomed in the distance like a snakeskin. The deadly current that once pulsated through the camp fence had been switched off long ago. My imagination feebly conjured a line of amorphous corpses drawn from the imprints left in my mind by photographs and movies, evaporating as quickly as they appeared. The past seemed utterly foreign, dead. The preserved remains of Auschwitz stood like hollowed out shells.

I remembered Simon Srebnik, one of the few survivors of Chelmno, pacing through the Rzuchowski Forest with Lanzmann by his side at the beginning of Shoah: “No one can describe it. No one can recreate what happened here. Impossible! And no one can understand it. Even I, here, now. I can’t believe I’m here. No, I just can’t believe it.” For Lanzmann, the Shoah resists easy comprehension and the implicit comfort of historical explanation. Its aim was to erase a people while simultaneously erasing the erasure of that people. With the victims reduced to ash and the most incriminating evidence largely destroyed, our knowledge of the event is provisional, our understanding and imagination limited. The place of history remains, sphinxlike, to connect the past and the present. It is a mute witness. Beholding its presence reminds us of the past’s insuperable alterity, like an inscrutable trace of what we cannot imagine, reconstruct, or fully understand. Having barely stepped through the barbed wire fence into Auschwitz, the sign about would-be escapees immediately underscored the push-pull dynamic between the visitor and the camp. Physical proximity to the past may only reveal a horizon that recedes further into the distance.

As I turned left between Blocks 24 and 14, I saw another guard tower in the distance next to a gate on the eastern perimeter of the camp. Beyond it lay a concrete bunker embedded in a slope of grass and surrounded by trees. I immediately recognized both structures from Lanzmann’s film. My mind replayed a long-take with a handheld camera that moved swiftly through the gate and past the guard tower, making a counterclockwise arc around the edge of the bunker before entering its forbidding steel door.

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As the camera jostled, I could hear the voiceover of Filip Müller, a Jewish prisoner from Czechoslovakia, relaying the story of his “recruitment” into the Sonderkommando (“special work detail”). The Sonderkommando were usually Jewish male prisoners forced to dispose of the victims’ bodies in crematoria and mass graves, usually working for several months before being liquidated themselves. The very rare members of the Sonderkommando who managed to survive the camps (such as Müller and Srebnik) have been invaluable sources of information about the Shoah’s “ground zero.” Many of the key testimonies in Shoah come from members of the Sonderkommando, who are asked to describe what they saw rather than relate how they survived. Their words are crucial for the film’s unwavering emphasis on the stark, inescapable reality of the Shoah: the extermination of six million European Jews.

In Müller’s first appearance in Shoah, Lanzmann artfully combines his testimony with several long-takes in the Auschwitz I camp to illustrate and in some sense “reenact” his story. The sequence begins with a reverse tracking shot of the execution wall located next to Block 11, the camp jail, where Müller had been imprisoned. In his memoir, Eyewitness Auschwitz: Three Years in the Gas Chambers (which I saw for sale at the museum bookstore), Müller recounts how he and a fellow inmate had been sent to Block 11 after being caught stealing water in a daring and desperate attempt at survival. Lanzmann does not include this detail in the film, preferring to focus on Müller’s first impressions of the gas chamber and crematorium as he unknowingly became part of the Sonderkommando. This backstory, however, does help to explain why Müller was in Block 11, where prisoners charged with offenses were incarcerated and members of the Sonderkommando were held in isolation to prevent their secret knowledge from being shared with the rest of the camp. It also accounts for his assumption that being led out of Block 11 by the SS meant he would be shot—its underground cells had special windows that forced the prisoners to hear the executions occurring outside without being able to see them. Müller’s defiant theft, however, earned him a very different form of punishment.

Lanzmann’s camera glides back from the execution wall as memorial flowers sag under a growing accumulation of winter snow. Reverent, gray silence. Then an interview excerpt is introduced as a voiceover—Lanzmann asks Müller how old he was when he first entered the crematorium at Auschwitz in May 1942. “Twenty,” he replies. As we begin hearing the story, Lanzmann’s camera provides a step-by-step approximation of Müller’s point of view during the ordeal. SS officers arrive and order Müller and his cellmates to march along one of the camp roads—the camera shifts from a reverse-track of the wall to a handheld shot that hurries along the road in question at eye level.

***

Müller remembers passing through a gate…the viewer passes through the gate;

Müller saw a building in the distance…Lanzmann trains the audience’s gaze upon it;

Müller noticed a door at the rear of the building…the camera pans left to reveal it.

A caption appears in passing to more fully identify the speaker.

An SS officer ordered Müller inside the building’s main entrance…we enter the door;

Ovens come into view…Müller says the smoke and stench overwhelmed him;

He states a revelation to his older self and his current listener(s): he was in the incineration chamber of the Auschwitz I crematorium.

The camera paces searchingly as Müller relates an unimaginable image—hundreds of corpses waiting to be burned.

A quick edit. A new shot.

Müller noticed mysterious bluish crystals near the bodies; the camera looks up dizzily at a (reconstructed) hole in the ceiling of the gas chamber where the Zyklon-B would have been deposited.

Before he could begin to comprehend what he was witnessing, he received an order to feed the ovens.

The handheld camera ends; Filip Müller appears before us in a medium shot.

***

By using the cinematic medium to synch Müller’s oral testimony with the sites he specifies in Auschwitz, Lanzmann teases out a partial reincarnation of the past that allows the viewer to bear witness to the Shoah at a new and perhaps deeper level than by reading a book or touring the camp. In this sequence, Lanzmann directs the film according to the voice of the witness. The truth contained within this testifying voice transcends the speaker himself, thus rendering his identity secondary in importance. By adapting to the voice, the camera performs a multilayered role. At the most basic level, it provides a literal, present-day illustration of the place in question. At the same time, it approximates Müller’s movement and point of view from that fateful Sunday in May 1942. In so doing, it temporarily becomes the voice’s body, which allows the viewer to experience a partial simulation of Müller’s circumstances. His bewildering introduction to the crematorium at Auschwitz I becomes part of the viewer’s experience and the collective memory of the Shoah. And yet even more is transpiring, even more is being revealed. We witness the chambers, the remnants, the perished members of the Sonderkommando, and the countless victims begin to stir and murmur as the camera matches itself to Müller’s voice. Lanzmann’s choreography induces the place of history to vibrate its deeply hidden truths ever so slightly.

When I recognized the guard tower, the gate, and the bunker that Monday morning, I hastened towards them. Now I was Lanzmann’s camera. I made the same counterclockwise turn around the bunker before entering the steel door. I walked through the gas chamber, I gazed at the ovens. The vibration, however, was absent. I had entered the camp but I was still at its threshold, doubtful that I would move beyond it.