Saturday, May 4
Today started at an absolutely ungodly hour for vacation (although oddly I have no problem getting up at 5:30 a.m. on safari!). Too early for breakfast to be available here, so I ate a donut I’d bought last night and took a few protein bars with me along with OJ and a bottle of water. Today was the day I’d planned to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau.
Let’s get the logistic out of the way. You can’t visit Auschwitz I without a guide from the museum there. I signed up with a local tour agency to take a bus to the site and from Auschwitz I to Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and back to Krakow. That part worked out fine. So for those considering going to Auschwitz from Krakow, it really doesn’t matter which company you go with, as they’re only driving you there and facilitating your entry to the sites (reserving your spot and paying your admission). The guide who takes you around the site is from the museum.
The tour starts at Auschwitz I, which was primarily use to house Soviet prisoners. There are 28 barracks and the camp held “only” 15,000-20,000 prisoners. It is disconcerting to say the least though to see how well landscaped it is, with new (since the camp was closed) trees and lilac bushes. Combining the landscaping with the bright blue skies and brilliant sun when visiting on a day like today almost feels wrong. I felt like it should have been overcast. And cold. At one point I saw a pigeon gathering straw to build a nest somewhere nearby and marveled that life is going on there in light (or in spite?) of all that has come before.
Our guide led us through several of the barracks that helped him weave his story. Indeed, they were mostly quite effective. He explained how the Zyclon-B gas was tested here, how the barracks were originally one story and the prisoners built the second stories on them. There was one corridor with the official intake photos of some of the prisoners (about 200 or so) with their newly given prisoner number which would become their identity for the rest of their stay here. It was hard to see the photos of them, knowing that they were being told this was all temporary...yet all of them had a date of death on them too.
There was a room of photos that were taken by prisoner who were working at the crematoriums. They’d snuck cameras and film and were able to document women being forced into the death chambers. They played such a role in proving that this all actually happened. I wondered if they could even believe it themselves.
There was a very large scale display of “prisoners plundered” which was all of the belongings taken from the prisoners. When they arrived at either camp, they were told to leave their belongings, mark up the bag if they must, but that they’d get the belongings back after a disinfecting shower and some food. Of course none of that happened, and for some new arrivals at the camp, their shower was really the gas chamber, because the weak or useless prisoners were killed upon arrival. What we saw were immense piles of eyeglasses, prosthetics and crutches, prayer shawls, brushes, cookware and horrifically enough, two tons of human hair. The Nazis kept all the hair that was shorn off the prisoners for reuse in textiles. Two tons of hair? That had to have been from an ungodly amount of people. It was horrifying. To think that what we were seeing, these ridiculously large piles of belongings, were from only a small set of prisoners is mind-numbing. And sad. It puts humans behind the numbers, and the result is chilling.
We were taken into a barracks that had cells in the basement for punishments. Some were just solitary confinement, some were starvation cells. The point of either was to drive the prisoner crazy or have them die under inhumane conditions. In the basement it was so narrow that it was one line of people weaving through the hallways. It was somewhat sign-posted for way-finding but we were meant to be following the guide. At one point, the young twenty-something in front of me took a wrong turn and we (half of our group of 30) lost our guide, and we were doing the same circuitous route we’d just done. We were wearing remote headsets so we could hear him no matter where we were within range and by now we’d lost him. He and the first half of the group had made it outside and were moving on. He never stopped to count his charges or wait for us. I finally got us outside and he was already two barracks away, and we had to run to catch up. I thought we were all there and started to pay attention to him again, wondering what I’d missed in this 5-7 minutes of lost time. Suddenly an elderly Jewish couple came up and she yelled at the guide, “you need to wait, you can’t just leave us.” Her husband yelled “I’m angry, you had no right running off on us, I lost people here and I’m not even getting to see it, you’re going too fast.” The guide was completely nonplussed and said in his monotone drone “there are groups behind us we must keep moving.” The gentleman countered “I came here to learn too, I deserve to see.” At this point a younger guest said to the guide “we asked you to slow down, we told you we’d lost the group.” Ugh. The older couple were both so visibly upset, my heart just broke for them. It had to have been bad enough to be here at all, to be reminded of what they’d lost and how, but then to add insult to injury. It took every part of me to swallow that down and refocus.
We ended this part of the tour by seeing the only gas chamber and crematorium still standing in either Auschwitz camp. The larger ones at Birkenau were destroyed by the Nazis as part of their attempts to destroy the evidence. It was more than a little bit creepy to be in the gas chamber and then see the adjacent ovens. While the Nazis claimed Zyclon B was the most humane way to kill, it certainly didn’t sound that way to me.
We had a quick break before we boarded the bus to Birkenau. Thankfully they don’t make us walk the 3km between camps. Who knows who the guide would have left in the dust on that walk. During the break I let our tour operator know what happened and that the couple was very upset and I found what had happened inappropriate. She said she’d reach out to them.
Auschwitz II or Birkenau was much larger. And completely desolate. The land is barren. You see the tell-tale main gate and the rail road tracks leading to the sorting platform, and then it’s nothing but barracks or destroyed barracks as far as you can see. This camp was massive and bleak. As the largest in the camp system, it had 300 barracks. Towards the end of the war there were over 99,000 prisoners here and 3,500 Nazi workers. I think of everything, I was just not prepared for the scope of it, how large it actually was. We saw the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria and walked past many of the barracks. We were allowed in one to see the three-high bunks and how primitive the structure was. How anyone lived in there in the winter is beyond me. Even today I found it cold in there. To say that this is all beyond comprehension is really an understatement. Even reading back all that I’ve just written, it doesn’t seem to do the experience justice at all.
We boarded the bus for the hour-long trip back to Krakow. We arrived at 2:00 and I was ravenous and feeling pretty crappy from not having eaten well since the food tour yesterday. I went back to the really good Polish restaurant we went to yesterday. I had the potato cakes again, pierogis stuffed with sweet cottage cheese, spinach and caramelized onions and a glass of that rose. I felt so much better with food in my stomach, but mentally I was still off. It was only 3:30 and too early to crash at the hotel but I needed to do something to clear my mind.
I decided to pop over to The Europeum, the national museum’s European painting collection. It was only 4 rooms and their prized Rembrandt landscape is on loan to Warsaw (dang it) but I did stumble quite literally over a Vigee Lebrun! I love seeing her portraits and I was thrilled to see an old friend in her here.
That wasn’t quite the dose of museum I needed so I just walked. I went back toward castle hill and walked along the river. I watched little kids playing and bigger kids running around the stalls at a market on the green there. It was warmer than the morning and the fresh air felt good. So I continued my big circle around the Old Town and headed back toward my hotel. I popped into an ice cream shop and had mint and chocolate on a cone. Continued my stroll a bit more and still felt it too early to pack it in for the day. That’s when one of the most fortuitous things happened...
I looked up and saw a wine bar. Seriously, I had no intentions of doing anything but people-watching with a glass of wine. When I said I’d be interested in trying some Polish wines, the server poured me a flight of 5, from white to rose to red, and a plate of Polish cheeses to go with. She told me about the origins of each and what makes them good. It was amazing!! What that sweet lady didn’t know is how a little extra TLC sent my way was just what I needed. It wasn’t the wine or the cheese, but a friendly person willing to talk wine with me. And that made all the difference.
This whole day reminds me of something my travel guru Anthony Bourdain once said that resonates so strongly with me today: “Travel isn’t always pretty. It isn’t always comfortable. Sometimes it hurts, it even breaks your heart. But that’s okay. The journey changes you; it should change you. It leaves marks on your memory, on your consciousness, on your heart, and on your body. You take something with you. Hopefully, you leave something good behind.”
Today travel wasn’t pretty or comfortable. Until the wine bar.
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