Auschwitz I had not been built by the SS; rather it had been converted from an old military barracks built by the Austrian army before the First World War. The Polish army had used it after 1918, and now the SS had turned it into a concentration camp. They’d put up additional barrack blocks and surrounded it with an electrified fence, but it was still recognizably the same place. It was here that the wounded Corporal Gustav Kleinmann had been in the hospital in 1915, in this very spot by the Soła, the river that flowed from the lake by the village where he’d been born. When he’d last seen it,
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