I’ve visited several camps and countless places important to European Jewish life, and I have vivid memories of many viscerally moving moments–at the Anne Frank house, feeling what it would have been like to live with 7 other people in that tiny space (it looks much larger in the film); at Birkenau, in the freezing cold of November, with the crumbled chimneys of the burnt barracks stretching as far as they eye could see; at Majdanek in mid-summer, entering into the “shoe building” and being overcome, first, by the sight of hundreds of thousands of shoes filling the entire building, floor to ceiling, with the exception of a narrow passage in the middle, and second, by the overwhelming stench of the decaying shoes–so undeniably human, so uncomfortably intimate.

I guess the commonality in these experiences was the way they engaged a fuller range of senses–I could feel the extremes of heat and cold, the cramped claustrophobia of the inside spaces, the exhausting vastness of the outside spaces. And the smell of those shoes still haunts me…