She was already flying through Amsterdam enroute to Africa for a photography course and some photo work in Uganda, Rwanda and Ethiopia, and used some flyer miles to hop over to Warszawa! It was a quick weekend visit, but here's some of the sights we got to see... Well, first off, our trusty rusty Ford Escort Kombi died, and we had to quickly purchase this alien Fiat fireball so we could all get down to Krakow in a jiffy!
just kidding, thankfully! These cars are all over Poland, and Jill wants every one of them banned from the highways-with one person they can max out around 55-60 mph...but they always seem to be packed to the gills with 4 or more people, and usually large people...then they max out around 40 mph...
But we made it to Krakow and unfortunately didn't arrange a place to stay, thinking tourist seaason was ending...so we got a swanky room at the 'nearest hostel to Old Town', an interesting, young person-filled pinkish/reddish thing west of town, and close to where our half marathon started last spring.
To make up for it, we found a nicer place for her and Jill to stay on night #2, right off the Old Town square, while I headed back to Warsaw to teach in the morning. So we saw the usual sights in Krakow, then on Sunday we catched an hour + van ride, 60 km west to Oswiecim, also known the world over by its German name, Auschwitz.
Not only is it the scene of the largest experiment in genocide in human history, it's also the world's largest cemetaryThe 'town' is split up into 3 camps: Auschwitz 1, 2 (Birkenau) and Monowitz (Monowice). A1 was originally a Polish miltary camp, conveniently converted to a prison camp, torture chamber, and the fist gas chamber for the Jews, Roma (gypsies), and Polish, Russian and even German political prisoners. But it wasn't big enough to hold (and to process) the incoming trainloads of workers and victims, so Birkenau was built in 1941/2-solely for the elimination of human beings. Eventually 40 camps were created in the region, all for the same purpose. In the end, 1.5 million, yes, 1,500,000 human beings from 27 nations, including 1.3 million Jews, 150,000 Russians, 75,000 Poles and 21,000 Roma were wiped from the face of the earth here, just at Birkenau. The total loss in all the camps for WWII was 5 million, 3 million of which were Polish Jews.
With the Russians hot the on the heels of the fleeing Nazis, the Germans had little time to destroy their evidence of their 'experiments' in genocide. Much of the architecture still stands, yet the 4 largest gas chambers were dynamited-a disgusting set of buildings where the Jews were led into thinking they were about to all take a group shower before they started their new life in this temporary camp, until they were gassed en masse, 2000 people at a time, and incinerated on the spot.
The camp's original Polish Army barracks still stand, and if you didn't have a clue about the place's history, it's actually a nice looking place, full of orderly red brick buildings, lined with tall trees, leaning slightly and dropping some of their colorful, golden leaves. But the barracks have been converted to museums, each representing different parts of the camps and what the Russians 'found' after the liberation in 1945, including TONS of human hair, used for weaving hats, scarves, jackets and wigs for the fashionably conscious back in Deutschland. And I don't mean 'tons' as an expression, I mean it literally. There were also rooms full of the luggage the Jews had brought with them, the last of their possessions after leaving their homes or the walled ghettos. Rooms full of glasses (spectacles), shoes, shoes, thousands of shoes. Whatever the Nazis could re-use for their own gain, they did. What we saw was what was left. There's no way to fathom how many of these kinds of items passed through these places.
The barracks were also full of various types of 'sleeping' chambers. They displayed the progression of the structures and living conditions the prisoners lived in-first on wood floors with some hay, then mattresses, then cots, then bunk beds stacked to the ceiling, with as many bodies squeezed on as possible-both because so many people had been shipped there, and for those who hadn't been eliminated yet to try to stay warm and survive the freezing winter nights. Dysentery was the norm, as was starvation. Those who couldn't work were eliminated (the old, young and female). Those who did anything out of the ordinary were eliminated, if not tortured first.
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