Here is an eloquent, impassioned account of a first visit to Auschwitz.

Not least the stunning bewildering realisation when you arrive at the site that the car-park in front of it is full of ... tourist coaches. People in shorts with video cameras, chatting away, perhaps looking forward to moving on to the next mass tourist attraction near Krakow, the salt mines.

The accompanying almost cheery summer pictures bring out well the baffling feeling one has visiting the camp. How did it all happen? How come it is now a tourist site? How come I am here trying to grapple with all this in my head?

Why is that tawdry supermarket over the road so close to the camp? How does one start to try to work out just how far a supermarket 'should' be built from the entrance to a former death-camp?

Imagine what it must be like to live in the town of Oświęcim now. A place of some historical distinction dating back 1000 years, yet now largely ignored by tourists and visitors who want to see only the fearsome Nazi camp built there because it was a handy European railroad crossing.

How to pitch a positive PR campaign for the town? What foreign investor will be keen to invest there, with that baneful camp so closely associated with it? But if one doesn't try to live a normal life nearby, does that mean that the Nazis somehow have won, blighting the area for ever?

One odd thing about Auschwitz is that the operational and policy responsibility for the camp complex and its future is shared among various local and national bodies, with different religious communities too all closely following developments. This creates many possibilities for furious disputes, as have happened down the years.

It also means that, oddly enough, the camp complex is not especially well funded. Nor is it easy to get a decision taken on how to make changes. 

As British Ambassador in 2004 I was told that the Auschwitz archives contained a large collection of poignant drawings made by prisoners, but that the museum/camp authorities did not have the funds to sort them all out and display them properly or publish a book of them.

I suggested that the 60th anniversary of the Liberation of Auschwitz would be a fine opportunity to set up an international appeal to make this happen - the British Embassy would be ready to help drum up high-level British support as part of a wider initiative.

Nice idea? So it seemed. But it shriveled away, no-one on the Polish side seemingly keen to take a lead and drive the project forward (partly, to be fair, because the sheer scale of the Anniversary commemorative events and the visits by Putin/Chirac/Cheney and so many others swamped everything else).

So Auschwitz remains there, with all its ghastly contradictions on daily display.

Yet haunting though it is to visit that camp, a lot has to be left to the imagination as the Nazis did quite a good job in demolishing part of the complex as they fled the Red Army's advance in 1945.

To see even more of what these fiendish places were actually like, you need to go further east in Poland, to Lublin. And the Majdanek camp, much of which was not destroyed. Macabre beyond words.