Away in Krakow for a week and spent a day at Auschwitz. It was everything I expected it to be, shocking, horrific, sad, but also very different. It is on the outskirts of a small town and not in the middle of nowhere as I had expected. As I've seen it in so many familiar, it also felt a bit like a film set.

But I also learned that although I thought knew about Auschwitz, there was a lot I didn't know - the sheer scale of the operation and the the way they looted the Jews of everything they had; their property, their clothes, even their hair and their gold filings. It made me think about the way we see history as a story that we already know. To go back and look again, to excavate human stories and make a personal connection with history seemed to me to be something everyone should do. As I walked the other way from the ruined crematoriums along a path called 'Road of Death,' the sun was shining and the history of that place seemed both impossible and far too real.