By Patrick Smith

The train from Paris to Krakow stops in Prague, capital of the Czech Republic. I had my suspicions about this city, partly inspired by a postcard I'd found on the floor of the Frankfurt airport, dropped by a teenage girl who babbled ridiculously in thick, frilly handwriting about the cheap drinks and cool architecture of the Czech capital. "Mixed drinks for a dollar!" she wrote. "I love it, I love it!"

Prague has become a cold gothic Disneyworld overrun by teenagers - packs of insolent, chain-smoking schoolkids who flood the cathedrals and museums. Even on a cold, rainy, off-season weekday there are long lines and shouting students everywhere, snapping photos of each other next to statues and clopping around in their high-heeled clogs.

Prague's architecture is indeed splendid, but its atmosphere is spoiled by the adolescent hordes that have been pouring in since the country's Velvet Revolution of 1989. Day-trippers come from Germany and Austria, and weekenders arrive by the bus load from France and Belgium. Russians, Poles, and Hungarians all flock here for holiday. Summer can be unbearable, with some of the worst crowds on the continent. Summer is also when the Americans come. Armed with Let's Go guides and Eurail passes bought by mom and dad for graduation, they converge like some gnarly-haired version of the Soviet army on the old town square, emptying their backpacks around the fountains and making charcoal sketches of the bridge towers.

My twelve-hour layover was enough, and I was back on the overnight train - the 8 o'clock departure out of town. At the station, a magic-marker sign advertised "hamburgery" and "hod dog American."

Quiet and austere, the medieval town of Krakow in southwestern Poland is, for now, still uninfected by tourist mobs or Western-style glitz. I arrived there at sunrise, tired and thirsty, hung-over from the frenzy of Prague. I found a bench in the Rynek Glówny, the ancient plaza in the center of town, and sat beneath the twelfth century spire of the Church of Our Lady. It was a cold Wednesday morning in March - the first day of Spring.

For about a dollar I bought a can of Coke and an unbelievably salty slab of bread from a street vendor who mumbled angrily when I mistakenly handed her Deutschemarks instead of Polish zloty. She was a great tortoise of a woman, draped from head to foot with a thick black shawl. I ate what I could of the salt-loaf, tossing the rest on the ground where it was quickly devoured by a rapacious crowd of pigeons. An apparition appeared before me: two old men with tall black hats carrying enormous wire brushes, their faces covered with soot. "Dzien dobry," called one of them, cheerfully saying hello. I nodded unsurely and let them pass. They were chimney-sweeps.

I'd had enough of Europe. I was daydreaming of Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Maldive Islands -- the places I really wanted to see. But there was one last attraction I had to visit. My vacation would culminate there, at a spot that had been on my must-see list for years, an hour's drive from my concrete bench below the church. I gathered my strength and hired a taxi, arriving in the town of Oswiecim at about ten o'clock. Oswiecim is the Polish name for Auschwitz, site of the Nazis' biggest and most notorious concentration camp during World War Two. I am not Jewish. None of my friends or relatives were murdered by the Germans. Yet I'd developed a fascination with Auschwitz, with the fact such a preposterously evil place is left standing, there for anybody to wander through with a camera and film.

Arbeit Macht Frei reads the camp's iron gate. Work Makes You Free. There were more than ten thousand German prison camps across Europe during the twelve-year Nazi reign. Most were built as work camps, communities of forced labor to support the war industry. Others, like Auschwitz, became extermination centers. The total number killed in the Holocaust approaches eleven million, the majority of them Jews. Auschwitz is, in fact, two separate death camps. The original, built in 1940 as a Polish army barracks, is called Auschwitz I, while the much larger Birkenau, also known as Auschwitz II, is three kilometers across town. Slaughter and atrocities took place at both, but Birkenau is where the mass exterminations actually occurred.

Auschwitz has been overhauled and turned into a museum. Today its impeccably manicured grounds are perversely reminiscent of a college campus. Strolling along the trimmed lawns and neat brick buildings I was appalled by my own temptation to make a sarcastic wisecrack. Some things are sacred, I guess, even for a smart-ass like me, and fortunately I could share my awful joke only with myself. "I just love what they've done with the place," I mused.

At the gas chamber I waited for a group of young tourists to clear out, then entered alone into the reconstructed crematorium. It reminded me of the boiler room in my old grammar school - dark and damp, with concrete walls and the smell of a parking garage. I poked around a bit, uncomfortably conscious of the echoes of my footsteps. In a corner beneath five decades of dust and grime was a canvas stretcher, its fabric battered and torn like old parchment. I ran my hand along its bare wooden handle, imagining the shouts of the Nazi orderlies as they hauled around bodies like loaves of bread in a bakery, the arms of the dead flailing over the rails of the stretchers.

In the center of the room are the ovens. Destroyed by the Germans, they were pieced back together from the original materials. Each has a cast-iron door. I grabbed one and slowly pulled it shut, latching snug its big metal hasp. It glided smoothly along its oiled hinges, and the hasp fell securely into place with a fat click. It wasn't unlike the closing of the three-dollar 'Heavyload' at the laundromat back home. I opened and closed it again, then repeated this several times, both fascinated and repulsed by what I was doing. Where else on earth, I wondered, is it possible to go hands-on with so much evil?

Unlike the restored Auschwitz I, Birkenau was left more or less as it was found. Most impressive is its scale. A staggering expanse of demolished barracks stretches nearly to the horizon. These were home to some 100,000 inmates at a time. Their brick hearths remain intact, rising like long rows of grave markers from the flat landscape. A few of the barracks still stand, and the experience of wandering through these buildings is indescribable. Dilapidated wooden bunks line the walls like bookcases, and the graffiti of doomed prisoners is etched into them - German, French, and Polish scribblings. We've all seen the photos of the inmates crammed together - six or seven people to a single bunk, with their shaved heads and gray pajamas. Such pictures are powerful enough, but a first hand inspection is the stuff of nightmares. Adjacent to the barracks are the latrines; huge barns of shattered porcelain troughs.

At the far end of camp are what's left of the colossal crematoria and gas chambers, which were blown up by the retreating Nazis. You can crawl amidst the ruins if you like, mingling with the ghosts of the 1.2 million people who died in there. Later you'll ponder the significance of the bits of grit and mortar embedded in the soles of your sneakers.

Birkenau's entire perimeter is surrounded by the remains of an electrified fence. Walking near an abandoned stretch, I stopped briefly to rest. Not another soul was in sight. There on the first day of spring, it might have been poetic had I crouched to notice, say, two small flowers growing through the rusted barbs of the fence. But there was no such poetry, no symbolic flowers of freedom, peace, or triumph over evil. There was only a cold March wind and a mournful sky. What I did notice, though, was that two electrical conductor pegs had broken from their posts and lay on the ground.

The conductors are the fist-sized ceramic cylinders spaced every few feet along the fence, around which the deadly electrical wire was wound. I knew I had to take them. I stood there, silently trying to justify my impending petty theft, weighing its glaring implications, and was reminded of something that happened on an earlier trip I'd taken, when I pilfered a mummified human jaw bone from an unearthed Indian grave in Peru. Now, as then, the temptation was irresistible, and I bent down and pried both ceramic cylinders from the mud. I wrapped them in a road map and tucked them into my backpack.

Auschwitz and Birkenau are monuments to evil. Is the theft of two tiny objects an enhancement or a betrayal of its existence as a reminder of our dark potential? Some will argue the site should be bulldozed, torn down and farmed over like the Berlin Wall. Much in the way a visit to a cemetery invites introspective searching into one's own mortality, you'd expect a visit to Auschwitz to promote some careful thought into the nature and lessons of humankind's cruelties. There would be plenty of chances, you'd think, for some quiet meditation, and the taking of property would be blasphemous. But instead of sadness or reflection, I found only bare-boned repulsion.

The images of Auschwitz are too stark, the remnants too grisly. As a survivor, maybe, the experience would be different, but for a tourist or student of history there is nothing but shock; that pit-of-the-stomach feeling you get after seeing a bloody car crash. In many ways the camp is a parody of itself, far beyond anything sacred, and so incredibly sinister that the taking of a souvenir seems ghastly but without moral consequence. Is it possible to deface or defame evil? Blasphemy or not, today my conductor pegs sit on a shelf at home, a foot or so from the Peruvian jaw bone, used occasionally as bookends or paperweights.

They look like salt shakers. People sometimes ask about the curious objects, and most are horrified when I explain. Others, though, are more appreciative, cautiously understanding of the desire to possess something so absurdly profound.