The bus stop for Auschwitz is right outside the door. The journey takes 90 minutes. En route, you'll see farmers working their fields with oxen. The airport is mercifully small when time is at a premium.

For 300, you can stay the full weekend, take in John Paul II's Catholic city and see terrific housing projects, the sole remains of communist rule.

The main square in Kazimierz is rotting on one side.

The buildings there will be held in trust until 2045, to allow possible claims for property confiscated during the Holocaust.

On the renovated side of the square, with its pavement cafes and boutiques, is the Alej guest house, which also offers a "jewish restaurant artistic cafe".

Spielberg ate there while filming Schindler's List. A suite of rooms in Alej rents for 60.

A spacious lobby, which contains the bathroom, opens onto a middle room, complete with chaise longue, writing table and spare bed. The walk-through suite leads directly onto a huge double bedroom, brightened by two windows which overlook the square. It feels like mittel-europe. On the ground floor, a four-course meal, around 15, with wine, is served while Yiddish music is played by a quartet of flute, cello, violin and accordion.

The square, complete with two ancient synagogues and cemeteries, is packed by day with tourists hot on the trail of Schindler.

The bus leaves for Auschwitz every hour, starting at 9am.

The small town is dusty and sleepy, though trains from England to the Urals clunk through 24 hours a day. Scarcely anyone ever gets off there, apart from millions of Jews in the second World War. It is strange to realise exactly where you are when you hear the wailing horn signal an approaching train.

Initially, the Jews walked the 15-minute road to the Polish military barracks which the Nazis had converted into a concentration camp. As the work of the Holocaust was speeded up, and the cheek-by-jowl killing camp of Birkenau was built to accommodate that, a special spur line was constructed, which led directly to the barracks and thence to Birkenau.

Now a bus shuttles visitors between the two.

The approach to Auschwitz barracks is obscured by a huge car park, interactive memorial centre and landscaped grounds. You casually round a corner and there is the iron arch on which is wrought the words "Arbeit Macht Frei". Crowded right up against this gate is an untidy structure of wood and stone, once a crematorium.

The barracks are as banal as any other, and more tidy now than most. If you stayed outside, you would have no idea what happened inside.

Each barracks is now a museum, so carefully ordered and lighted that you might be in an art gallery. Behind the floorto-ceiling plate-glass window in one, is an assortment of dark hair shorn from the Auschwitz's victims . . . here and there is a glint of red and blonde, designed to catch the eye. Shining amidst the raked bank of shoes, grey with age, are a few colourful pairs which achingly delight the senses. Auschwitz is uneasily chi-chi.

Birkenau is not, despite the beautiful stone arch through which the trains chugged on a spur that cut efficiently into its heart. Birkenau is vast. Only five wooden huts remain. You can be alone for hours, wandering around what is left . . .

row upon row of cement foundations, wire fencing, stone pillars and look-out posts.

There is a green road, eerily out of place here. It was down this road that Jews were funnelled and hurried to the crematoriums in the last year of war. For those Jews, there was neither time nor room in Birkenau, though they had to wait for hours until the ash was cleared out of the ovens. The ovens were hidden behind groves of silver birch.

Birkenau has returned to nature. Deer graze amid the foundations. Frogs leap around the ponds where ashes were scattered. Farmers cultivate right up to the entrance.

A casual scuffle in the camp dirt turned up half of a rusty teaspoon, which would have been a prized implement back then. To rebury it or not? There is nothing . . . yet . . . to stop visitors lifting a souvenir brick.