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“Arbeit macht frei” - work makes you free – the taunting words that mark the entrance to one of the most notorious Nazi concentration camps where 1.1 million prisoners were tortured and killed.
Only today, some of the victims to the regimes that ruled here stood under the sign in the sunshine, survivors who were now free.
It was impossible not to be chilled by that image.
Behind them stood 11,000 people also there to walk the three kilometres between Auschwitz and Birkenau – to contrast with the death marches which took place towards the end of the war.
And what one participant described triuphantly as a “na na na na na” moment in history, a real “f*** you, you tried but you didn’t do it” to the Nazis.
For 20-year-old student Adam, he said: “I used to be frightened of coming here, of what I would have to face personally and as a whole.
“But I’m no longer intimidated coming through those gates.”
When Angie Konrad’s mother was liberated by the Soviets and had to walk miles to the nearest town. She said: “My mum had not shed a tear during her camp days, but as they trudged through the cold and the dark, they saw cottages dotted around the countryside with lights on and smoke coming out of chimneys.
“That was when she broke down - at the thought of people being warm and safe all that time, while she had been freezing and hungry.”
And it was that image I struggled with on Thursday's March Of The Living, while others marched, sang, and revelled in the freedom, I could not take my eyes of the houses that lined the roads between the camps, all witnesses to what had happned.
The same ones with the heating and food, the same ones who in the 1940s would have had an operating concentration camp on their doorstep.
Angie’s mother was taken to a centre and given clean clothes and the opportunity to wash for the first time in months: “My mum left the bathroom and walked down a long corridor towards a little scrawny boy who was walking towards her.
“He was skinny and covered in blotches, with peculiar scrappy hair and huge staring eyes.
“It was only when she was a few inches away from him that she realised she was walking towards a mirror.
“She had typhoid and nits, was severely malnourished and her hair had been mostly shaved off.”
Over 45 countries took part in the annual march from the gates of Auschwitz to a commemoration ceremony at Birkenau.
But the British group had taken part in a preparation week in Poland visiting sites, questioning narratives and hearing individual stories which provided them with the context needed to understand a march like this.
For me and many others I spoke to, the March of the Living itself is an inspiring afterthought, while I see the power and defiance in the celebratory atmosphere, I struggled with it.
It has been the universal lessons of the Holocaust that will stick with me. The educators and survivors like Mala and Zigi, constant reminders to challenge and ask questions, and to never to passively receive information about the horrific events of our history or humanity.