A strange heaviness hung in the air at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, about an hour and a half east of Krakow, Poland. Visitors slipped quietly in and out of a series of large brick buildings, arranged in a neat grid just beyond the infamous ironclad gate reading Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work Will Set You Free” in German).

The site of the Nazi concentration camp has operated as a museum and a memorial since 1947, but as our tour guide, Marcin Łacina, reminded us more than once during our visit, it’s also a massive graveyard.

At least 1.1 million people died here, systemically murdered on an industrial scale by the Nazis in their quest to cleanse their territory of anyone who did not have Germanic blood—namely the Roma, the Slavs, and, of course, the Jews. There were gay people, political prisoners, and other ethnic minorities also detained there and murdered. Over 75 years later, some of the victims’ remains, burnt to ash in giant furnaces, still permeate the earth, a lasting stain on human history.

Łacina is one of some 340 guide-educators who help visitors from all over the world process and understand the great evils perpetrated on this site, a position that has served as his full-time job since the spring of 2018. In 2022, 1,184,000 visitors toured the site.

Marcin Łacina leading a tour at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

The site of Auschwitz is large, with the main camp and also the larger secondary camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a short bus ride away. Both preserve not only the site of the genocide, but evidence of how the extermination camp was operated as well as archival materials from the victims.

Łacina led us through the grounds with a noted poise and composure, calmly detailing evils so atrocious that they are difficult to comprehend. Engaging with the subject of genocide day after day, and having to adequately explain the gravity of what happened at Auschwitz to a constant stream of visitors, is emotionally grueling.

“It is difficult,” Łacina admitted to Artnet News. Even though he has become accustomed to the cold hard facts of Auschwitz history, he still must deal the emotions of guests, who are sometimes moved to tears during tours. “The behavior of people will affect me; the weather will affect me. I will try to leave the subject when I am out of work—I will not be sitting in books and podcasts [about the Holocaust]. I focus on taking care of the garden or something like that.”

Łacina grew up in Poland, and first visited Auschwitz with his classmates as a teenager, as is standard in the country. “To be honest, I remember nothing after so many years,” he said.

A gate at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

When he started working at Auschwitz, he had also forgotten that his grandmother’s aunt was a survivor of the camp.

“She would visit my grandmother from time to time for tea or coffee, so I knew her. And at some point, someone told me that she was a prisoner of Auschwitz. But being a child, you don’t really understand—and this is not the subject that is raised all the time,” Łacina said. “It was a typical Polish story here. She was a young woman, and she was arrested during a round up at the railway station. She had her documents, everything was correct, but she was in the wrong place in the wrong time.”

It is stories like this—and the need to keep their memory alive—that underscores the importance of maintaining Auschwitz as a museum and memorial, and teaching the world about its history.

The path to Łacina’s current job, which sees him offer between five and 10 three-hour English-speaking tours at the museum each week, was somewhat circuitous. (He used the word “accidentally” to describe the process.) After earning a degree in computer science, he worked in security, eventually moving to a village near Auschwitz and commuting back to Krakow.

He and his wife, Anya, both applied during a call from the museum. To become a tour guide of such an important site requires a lecture-based training course, followed by three exams. Applicants then have to give a mock tour, answering questions from experienced guides who play the role of an inquisitive, if ill-informed visitor. In total, it takes five hours—but Łacina, his wife, and his neighbor all passed, and work at the museum to this day.

The entrance to the Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Over the years, there have been challenges to the position—visitors who aren’t engaged with the subject matter, or even those who misbehave. (He hasn’t encountered Holocaust deniers, but knows other guides who have.) But what Łacina has learned is that it’s impossible to predict how people will react—a group of otherwise-fidgety school children can be attentive, respectful guests.

Łacina has given tours to survivors and guests who had immediate family members in the camps. But there are also visitors for whom the camp is just one stop on a larger itinerary with a European tour group, as well as those who know next to nothing about Auschwitz.

One memorable moment was having to explain to a group of foreign exchange students from Singapore that the Arbeit Macht Frei sign was in German—which he had always assumed was obvious.

The train tracks leading to the station at the Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

“I had to start from the beginning, that the war broke out when Germany was under the rule of the Nazis. I explained their ideology, the goal of the war, and why they had concentration camps in occupied country here,” Łacina said. “They said ‘okay, now we get it’—and I was like ‘now we are on the same page.’ From there it went brilliantly.”

But even as a guide, there is always more history to learn, a story that goes far beyond what most of us have gleaned from books and films.

In the permanent exhibition, there is a room filled with nearly two tons of hair shorn from the heads of some 40,000 female victims. (Disgustingly, German companies would purchase this hair to produce cloth.) Elsewhere, there are photographs of the trains arriving at the camp, packed with victims laden with their personal belongings. Visitors walk in their footsteps along the train tracks, and behold mountains of collected shoes and suitcases they never used again. Tours pass through one of the gas chambers, where new arrivals to the camp were put to death.

A selection of kitchen tools belonging to victims of Auschwitz concentration camp. Photo by Sarah Cascone.

Even facing these sites first hand, it is hard to fathom the scale of the genocide.

“I think that the most powerful moment on the tour is the moment that triggers your emotions, whatever that is. And for every single person, it will be different,” Łacina said. “It could be a photograph. Maybe somebody in your family looks similar, or maybe you have a child who is the same age. Or maybe you look at a suitcase that for all the other people, has no particular emotional impact—but you have a friend who has the same surname as written on the suitcase, and that touches you.”