OSWIECIM, Poland — At first the red-brick barracks look almost respectable, numbered like normal houses along tree-lined paths. But then the gas chamber reveals itself through the wintry fog, and the death wall where prisoners were stripped and shot, and the soil and ponds still full of teeth and crumbled bones from incinerated corpses.

The death factory where the Nazis murdered 1.5 million people went idle 60 years ago Thursday, but Auschwitz, ground zero of human savagery, still has the power to stun its visitors into silence.

"For me, this is a grave, not a museum," said Shalom Gross, a 57-year-old Israeli who lost more than 80 relatives to the Holocaust on his mother's side alone.

Auschwitz today is many things at once: an emblem of evil, a site of historical remembrance, a vast cemetery. With its neighbor Birkenau and the town of Oswiecim — the Polish name of Auschwitz — it is also a place where life goes on, where people go to work, shop for groceries and try to make a living in a depressed coal-mining region where unemployment runs to 19 percent.

Some of the barracks serve as offices for the scholars and administrators at the memorial site, who walk past the gas chamber and barbed wire as they go to and from work. A room once occupied by an SS guard is eerily preserved, down to the photo of Adolf Hitler on the wall.

"It is strange to work here, where we don't have contact with beauty," said Franciszek Piper, the head of the museum's historical-research department, whose spare office is on the second floor of Block 23. "But if people in Poland wished to live far from the places where people were killed, persecuted, where the soil is soaked with the blood of those killed by the Nazis, then everyone would have to leave Poland."

The 60th anniversary carries special weight, because very few survivors are likely to be alive for the 70th. Vice President Dick Cheney will attend Thursday's ceremony at Auschwitz along with Presidents Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France. President Bush visited Auschwitz in 2003.

More than 90 percent of the victims from 1940 until the Soviet Army liberated the camp on Jan. 27, 1945, were Jews, and the rest were Gypsies, Polish political opponents, Soviet POWs, Catholics and homosexuals. They died in gas chambers, from starvation, medical experiments, disease or forced labor.

Auschwitz is in fact not one camp, but two: Auschwitz I, built in an abandoned Polish military base, and Auschwitz II, or Birkenau, a much bigger complex that went up later about two miles away to expedite the Nazis' Final Solution.

It is Birkenau that shocks more profoundly, a flat, vast space still ringed by the silver birch trees (birken in German) that gave the place its name. Crematoria lie in rubble as a reminder of the Nazis' effort to hide their crimes as their defeat loomed. Still intact are the rail tracks on which prisoners in cramped cattle cars were hauled into the camp and selected for slave labor, experiments, or death.

Many of the visitors are Israeli schoolchildren brought here to reinforce the ethos of "never again." Many more come from Germany, alone or in groups organized by schools and churches to confront their nation's past.

An estimated 600,000 people visit the camp each year. Most move about in reverence, yet even here, there's occasional levity — smiling tourists posing under the infamous main gate with its cynical slogan "ARBEIT MACHT FREI" (work makes you free), or a group of visitors laughing as they line up to see a documentary about mass murder.

Poland's chief rabbi, Michael Schudrich, says he has often seen such behavior at Auschwitz.

"It's exactly the people who are smiling that you want there," he said. "While it's disconcerting to see, the experience will play back in their heads — two months or two years later — and have an effect."