Po-land

The end of my semester abroad is quickly coming to a close! In a week, I'll be done with classes, my family will be here, and I'll be looking forward to a week traveling to Croatia and Slovenia before heading home...but before that, I still have 2 long assignments, 2 papers, and 5 final exams to do (3 exams on one day, even). So I can't look too far ahead, yet.

Last weekend I got a chance to take a very enjoyable trip to Poland. My friend Kira and I took the night train (in a sleeping car!) to Kraków on Friday night, and stayed all day Saturday and Sunday, to come back Sunday night and arrive in the morning, an hour before class started Monday morning. The train ride itself was an adventure--the sleeping compartment was pretty cool, and we actually got some sleep (unlike on my night bus trip to Prague). We even made a fort.

Kraków is a really awesome city. The tourist center is very small, so there's no need whatsoever to use public transportation--walking is sufficient. My favorite part of the city is quite definitely the town square, a huge open space with a big market hall in the center, which is one of the best people-watching places that I've ever seen. Also, although the tourists are numerous, it still seems like the local vs. tourist relationship is healthy (not like in, say, Prague or Rome). Polish people are, for the most part, simple and friendly. Also, prices are REALLY cheap in Poland--way cheaper than in Budapest, even--for example, a big meal at a nice restaurant with ornamental table settings and a live pianist ran me about $3.50.

Another of my favorite things about Kraków is one of its oldest traditions: ever since the Tartar invasion in the 14th (?) century, a bugler has played a fanfare from the top of the church in the main square on the hour, every hour of every day. The bugler plays four fanfares, to the "four corners of the world", and the tradition is to always cut each fanfare off suddenly--to commemorate a bugler who was shot by a Tartar arrow. Today's buglers are actually members of the firefighter service in Kraków, and bugling is only their secondary job, but boy would it be fun to have that job...



Main square of Kraków


Looking down from the clock tower into the Main Square.


Bugling


One of the harder poses to hold


Wawel Castle


The church inside Wawel Castle--Kraków's "Westminster Abbey"


The beginning of a long, long parade of some Catholic significance


I know, I know, I have a big head.


The church of John Paul II before he became the first non-Italian Pope in centuries.


Main Market Hall, in the main square




On Saturday we got the chance to see the site of the worst crime ever done to humanity. A 90 minute bus ride from Kraków is the southern Poland town of Oswiecim--better known by its German name, Auschwitz. In 1940, the Nazis began to use the old Polish barracks outside Oswiecim to house political prisoners. First used as "an instument of terror and extermination of Poles," eventually the concentration camp was enlarged, and citizens of countless Nazi-controlled countries, mostly Jews, were deported to Auschwitz to be executed. Estimates of the death toll at Auschwitz range between 1.1 and 1.5 million.

Konzentrationslager (KL) Auschwitz is now a museum, and the two main parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau), are open to the public. The philosophy of the museum is that humanity's mistakes will only happen again if they are forgetten.

To visit Auschwitz is very chilling, and I'm really glad I got a chance to visit, because it brings the reality of the Holocaust into sharp focus. It's amazing to think that the small, quiet, sun-lit (while we were there) compounds saw, only 65 years ago, some of the most emotional and horrific sights ever known to humankind. It's astounding to think of what the place would have looked like, and what sort of feelings were once felt there. Stepping into one of the gas chambers, where hundreds of thousands of lives were summarily brought short, on purpose, is an eye-opening experience--such an undisitinguished, clandestine room cannot live up to what happened in that room, time after time.


The infamous gate of Auschwitz I and its cynical inscription: "Work Sets You Free".


The execution wall at Auschwitz I. Many political prisoners and POWs were killed by firing squad here.


Artificial limbs taken from murdered victims, to be sold.



Human hair recovered from store rooms at Auschwitz. Hair was removed from bodies after executions, and were sold to textile companies.


Empty cans of lethal Cyclon B gas.


The (reconstructed) crematorium and gas chamber in Auschwitz I. Here were murdered mostly Polish political prisoners and POWs. The ovens here only were fast enough at burning corpses for small-scale mass murder, necessitating the construction of the much bigger camp 3 km away at Birkenau, which had 4 huge gas chambers/crematoria and 2 makeshift gas chambers.


Auschwitz I.


Main gate of Auschwitz II - Birkenau, from inside. Unlike Auschwitz I, Birkenau was built by the Nazis specifically for the purpose of mass murder. It is much bigger than Auschwitz I, and its number of prisoners peaked at 100,000.


Inside Birkenau. About a fourth of the original 400 buildings survived the Nazi's destruction of the camp near the end of the war. Of those buildings that were destroyed, only the chimneys remained.


View into the camp, from the entrance tower. The platform in between the railroad tracks is known as the "splitting platform"--where new arrivals were split into two groups, one which would enter the camp as prisoners, and the other which would be sent immediately to the gas chambers. About 75% of new arrivals were immediately executed. Most who were kept alive only temporarily postponed their death--most prisoners at Auschwitz died within 6 months of their arrival.


An average of 8 prisoners would share one of these "beds", in buildings designed after horse stables.


A pond full of human ashes.


The entrance to one of Birkenau's 6 factories of death. Three rooms made up the building. Closest is the underground entrance room, where prisoners were told to take off their clothes and hang them on numbered pegs, on the pretence of finding them after the "shower". Then the victims would be herded the second underground room, at the end of this one and going off to the right (behind the group of tourists). Here, there would be faucets which were never connected to any water supply. SS guards would drop poisonous Zyclon B gas into the chamber, killing all inside within 20 minutes. The bodies were then gone over by other prisoners, who stripped them of gold teeth, prosthetic limbs, and hair (which was sold to textile companies). The prisoners with this job apparently sometimes saw acquaintances among the dead. The bodies were then taken into the crematoria (the above-ground building straight ahead) and burned.


In this very spot, thousands of innocent people were efficiently and horrifically murdered.