Kraków is known for a number of things, but one of the biggest is that it neighbors the infamous Auschwitz concentration camp. The three of us arrives early morning after we took a night train from Prague so we decided to make the most out of the day and booked a day trip to Auschwitz later that day. We spent the morning looking for a McDonalds that my guide book said had a room inside a medieval vault they had found in excavations, but ended up ruining my No-McDonalds-In-Europe rule in a McDonalds on the other side of the town square that just looked kinda vault-ish. I would have been more devastated about the McDonalds streak hadn't the Aussies already convinced me to eat Burger King the morning before after a long night of drinking. Also, the real "medieval vault" room looked like pretty lame when we found it anyways.
After my first European McDonalds experience, or so I'm going to call it, we walked around the old town admiring the massive square (the largest in Europe according to my guidebook) and did a bit of window shopping along the busiest tourists streets. I bought a harmonica with the faint hope that it will keep me entertained on lonely days, but haven't had a chance to play it yet. Kind of sad...but at the same time that's good I guess.
Next was the tour of Auschwitz, and we found the tour company's meeting point and boarded the bus. Ten minutes into the hour long ride the weather took a turn for the worse, as dark clouds covered the sky and rain started to streak the windows of the bus. Fitting, I later realized, for what we were heading towards.
My girlfriend and I had toured a concentration camp outside of Munich about a month back, but nothing, not even that other camp, can prepare you for what you see at Auschwitz. Due to traffic out timing constraint, mixed with the quickly setting sun made it so we did the tour backwards - starting with Auschwitz II - Birkenau, the sister camp and main death camp of the Auschwitz camp network. Right away we were walking through the camp where an estimated one and a half million people were murdered.
Rows after rows of dormitories covered the massive fields, with rows of barren stone and brick chimneys marking the remains of hundreds of more such buildings that the Nazis had a chance to burn down before they took off just days before the Soviet front liberated the camp. Our tour guide showed us their living conditions - their dorms, their "bathrooms" if you can call it that, and walked us through a day in the life of the prisoners. Along with the other burnt down buildings, the Nazis also had time to destroy the gas chambers they used to do most of the mass killings, but walking around the rubble and seeing the stairs that led down into the "changing rooms" was still difficult to see. At first I was almost upset I couldn't see them (as obviously messed up as that sounds) but after I was glad they were no longer there. It was hard enough to see the rubble where more than a million men, women, and children were killed - to see the actual buildings would have been too much. You can not walk around these camps and not just run through your head again and again the question "how can anyone do this?"
From this point people were already silent. We boarded on our bus again and headed down the road to the original camp and the main headquarters of Himmler's evil mind, Auschwitz I. Walking through the main gate that read's "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Makes One Free), you get a chill. Bad things happened here. A couple of the old dormitories have been turned into a museum. The Nazis were very organized and kept inventory of almost everything, taking everything they could from their prisoners, and now much of this is on display. There we saw things that send a chill down your spine - the shoes, toothbrushes, combs, eyeglasses, suitcases, toys, just everything, from hundreds of thousands of prisoners, just on display behind glass walls. The hardest one for me - the hair of more than 30,000 women, some just girls, shaved off and collected for further need by the German people. To make matters worse, we then saw the building where the Nazis would perform medical experiments, even one inducing numerous diseases into the uterus' of Jewish women to find a way to make them impotent. Again - how can anyone do such a thing?
The ride back to Kraków was silent.
The next day we booked a more cheery tour. This time we were going to see the Wieliczka Salt Mine, located in the town of Wieliczka in southern Poland. The mine continuously produced table salt from the 1200s up through 2007, making it the world's 14th-oldest company. Pretty sweet right? Ok so it may sound a little lame at first, but get this - he mine reaches a depth of more than 325 meters and is over 300 meters long. In the two and a half hour tour we took, we cover less than one percent of the mine's passages. We also see four separate chapels carved out of the salt by the miners, which are just a few of the 44 down there! No seriously, real chapels not just rooms that they prayed in. That's how big this place is. Check out the pictures above. Every sculpture in the mine was made by real salt miners - no artists. Coolest part too - floor, wall, or ceiling, you can give it a lick and you can taste the salt!
The next day I headed my way to Bratislava, Slovakia. Why? Well why not?!
- Matt
Location:Kraków, Poland
Matt, "The ride back to Kraków was silent" sums it all up. I once visited Kraków when I wasn't much older than you are. I didn't visit Auschwtiz, more or less rationalizing I was on business and didn't have time. The reality was I was too scared and didn't want to deal with it. This adventure you are on is a great experience and no doubt enlightening. But, years from now you will forget many of the details of the things that are the most fun (the friends, the bars, the restaurants, the hostels, the interesting sites, etc..). But, you will not forget even the most minute details of Auschwitz. And that's good. "Never forget" is a lesson Jews are taught from an early age. It means never forget your Jewish heritage, but also that intolerance of any faith or culture is not only wrong, but dangerous. I trust you understand that now, perhaps even more than I do after this experience.
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