I ticked another box on my Bucket List last week.

It was one of the heaviest ticks I’ve ever had to make, and I do not believe any of the few experiences I still have on my to-do list will supersede in intensity or be in any way similar to the one I had when I visited the site of the former Nazi concentration camp in Dachau, Germany.

I sandwiched the three-hour tour of the complex just outside Munich in-between the beauty of Innsbruck and Salzburg and several cities in Bavaria to soften the impact of what I knew would be a highly emotional experience.

But I must say that the effort was not that successful. When I look back on the time I was on holiday, the picturesque views of the mountains, rivers and architecture fade away quickly against the horrendous gas chamber, crematorium and bare cells where thousands suffered and were brutally killed.

Last week I wrote about my loss of confidence in the human race. Well, my stop in Dachau did not help me restore it. If anything, it plummeted even further.

I was lucky to have had a historian to show me around, and not a guide who just pointed out the landmarks. He peppered his talk with his own experiences of meetings he had had with survivors of the Dachau camp, adding a great detail about how the events unfolded. Often, guides talk of just numbers and dates, but this guy gave such a personal account that, were it not for his age (he’s 47) you would have been forgiven for thinking that he was there when it all happened.

But he was also clever enough to allow his group members the time to think too, interspersing his monologue with a few minutes of silence intended to let everything seep in. On the one hand, he was able to give out the information required during such a visit and, on the other, allow some space for a kind of individual contact with the surroundings that served to enhance the inner feelings.

For one thing, even just a look inside one of the cells of what was a prison within a prison – there is a section of the complex specifically for that – would have been enough. The view through the iron bars from the outside gives the shivers, and the respectful silence of the many visitors who were touring the site with me was shattered inside my head with the cries and groans of the people who had been locked up in there.

I thought of those who simply gave up on life on the day they entered the camp, preferring to die rather than face the cruelty for which the SS officers were known. Some may even have deliberately broken the strict rules of the camp to be shot in the head to end all the suffering. Others ploughed on in their distressful routine in the hope that somehow they would make it through, only to die of hard work, malnutrition or disease.

I wondered what I would have done, and the answer came quickly.

The survivors who were liberated at the end of the war continued to live the trauma for the rest of their lives. Some had new families and lived for many years – the guide told us that one woman had told him that her way of hitting back against the Nazis was to have as large a family as possible, a clear revenge to the extermination plans that the SS had. But I am sure that the scars of their captivity remained till their death, on their bodies and in their heads.

As I walked across the main yard where prisoners used to assemble twice a day, I kept imagining the shuffles of those who could hardly stand on their feet and yet were expected to be on time for the roll-call, and who were shot if they were not. Who knows, maybe the pebble I had just kicked inadvertently was the same one that Prisoner X had looked at and been led to think about the times he had spent with his family on a beach somewhere. Maybe he smiled at the thought, and maybe it was his last smile.

Entering the gas chamber then took my breath away as I looked up at what the prisoners were told were showers and which, as you all know, then turned out to be sprinklers of poisonous toxins that killed them all. I could picture the fear in the eyes of those who were about to die and the hugs of comfort with loved ones or, perhaps, even complete strangers as life was taken away, but I could not imagine what went through their heads in those final moments.

The crematorium right next to the gas chamber then was the last link in the chain of human despicability against other humans.

I left the camp shaken by the experience, and a thought came to my head that what I had seen was a memorial to thousands who had died because others thought they were superior to them. For a moment, I thought that it was something that had happened long ago, and that it was not repeated and would not happen again.

But it was only a fleeting thought, because then I remembered that mass executions did not stop with the end of the Second World War.

As I walked through the gate, I looked back and saw the words “Never again” written in large letters beneath the monument that lies at the heart of the memorial. I shook my head because, in spite of the good intentions, what happened in Dachau happened again elsewhere afterwards, in other battles, in other countries, in other forms.

Humans do not seem to learn either from the mistakes others made before them or from their own mistakes.

This is why history repeats itself.

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