A chilling watchtower in the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp

Empty and numb is how most people feel after a visit to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.

Although just 70km west of the party-hard city of Krakow, Auschwitz might as well be on another planet. Set on the outskirts of the unassuming town of Oswiecim, everything about it is intrinsically disturbing.

This Nazi extermination camp where two million Jews, gypsies, homosexuals, political dissidents and prisoners of war met horrific deaths during World War II has since become a byword for genocide and torture.

Auschwitz is the generic name given to the entire complex which consisted of concentration, labour and death camps. Today, the museum displays are housed in the main Auschwitz concentration camp (its gated entrance marked by the notorious 'Work Makes You Free' sign), while the extermination camp at Birkenau, 3km away, contains the train tracks where victims arrived in packed cattle wagons, as well as the remnants of gas chambers, crematoria and industrial furnaces where they met their deaths. Here you can also find the stagnant green ponds where their ashes were dumped and a memorial erected to represent the grave of millions.

On a guided tour of the giant complex - often led by aging Auschwitz survivors - one can start to fathom the sheer efficiency with which the Germans executed their so-called 'Final Solution'. 

There's the hair of the shorn prisoners, encased behind glass cabinets.The suitcases, kitchen utensils and worldly possessions of the victims who thought they were being transported to a new life. The room with countless children's shoes - a stark symbol of innocence in a place that was anything but. The ordinariness of the gas chambers where prisoners thought they were merely taking showers. The matter-of-fact way the museum guides slide the trays in and out of the crematoriums to demonstrate how the corpses were burnt. The graphic, stomach-churning film footage taken by the camp's liberators.

Many people who visit Auschwitz come on a pilgrimage to remember family members who died or suffered here. The annual 'March of the Living' held every May commemorates Holocaust Remembrance Day and sees thousands of survivors and their families walk the 3km stretch between Auschwitz and Birkenau as a mark of solidarity and defiance.

Regular buses and trains run from Krakow to Oswiecim and an hourly bus runs between Auschwitz and Birkenau.