Because Sobibor and Plaznow and Treblinka are gone and there were plans to put a hotel and visitor's center in the administrative complex at Auschwitz. What little evidence remained was fading and could soon vanish. I can tell you what made me realize that I could go. But, there's no telling exactly why I felt so compelled to go. You know how it is.
Children often make decisions which they forget but later live out.
So, at the age of forty-eight, in the year of the fiftieth anniversary of the final transports of Jews from the Cracow ghetto, I kept my childhood promise by going to Poland to see what was left of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the twin sisters of no mercy. Having done so, I could not now forget what happened there or why or how if I wanted to.