Advertisement
Published: July 20th 2006
Edit Blog Post
Quick word of advice for traveling in the part of the world (everywhere but America) that uses 24 hour time format and the dd.mm.yy date format. Dates such as "17.07" can be easily mistaken for times like "19.10" on train tickets. For example, if you believe your ticket says your train leaves at 5:07 p.m. on July 17, double check that departure time. Otherwise you might (hypothetically) spend two hours twiddling your thumbs in the Budapest train station.
So we left Budapest on a Polish night train and (for the first time during all of our European train travels) arrived on time in Krakow at 5:45 a.m. Our visit to Krakow was nearly cut short (or made much longer) after a small mix-up that ended in our high-tailing it away from a tram conductor/scam artist who seemed to be asking for a 75 zloty bribe, but we soon settled into this absolutely charming city. We chose to visit Krakow in large part so that we could visit Auschwitz and Birkenau, but outside of our sobering tour of that history we fell in love with Krakow, itself.
Krakow is made for walking, which we did (being personas-non-grata on the tram).
Sculpture in Krakow's main square
Couldn't read the sign, but we can imagine what it symbolizes The Old City is beautiful and vibrant, and its cobblestone streets and vast central square host a much higher ratio of real stores to tourist traps than most places we've been. There's something almost grandmotherly about most of the people we've met -- like they're trying to take care of you and help you out while you're visiting their home. Oh, and make you fat, too. Brian was particularly taken with the food here and had as many different combinations of cabbage, potato, kielbasa, pork, beef, and butter as there were meals in each day. Alissa, on the other hand, not taking to the mystery meat stews quite as eagerly, has been subsisting quite contentedly on a diet of pierogies and 30-cent ice cream cones.
Krakow's central square, the Jewish Quarter, and the surrounding areas are also decorated with reminders of the nation's tumultuous political history. A series of billboards outside of the historic Wawel Castle highlight images of massive protests in the city against the Nazis and Soviets. One particularly stark image (from the early 1980s) is the massive central square filled with hundreds of thousands of Catholics wearing white shirts to show support for Pope John Paul
II after the attempt on his life, and at the same time to show the communist government that religious life could not be stifled.
While as a city, Krakow has recovered amazingly well from the massive distruction of WWII, its Jewish community has not. Prior to WWII, Krakow's Jewish community numbered around 65,000. 6,000 of those Jews survived the Nazi's extermination efforts and only around 150 remain today.
We visited Auschwitz on our second day here and needed some time to let the experience process before writing about it. There are actually two concerntration/death camps in the town of Auschwitz: Auschwitz I, which occupied former Polish Army barracks, and Auschwitz II-Birkeneau, which was built (using the slave labor of Soviet POWs and central European Jews) expressly for the purpose of efficiently killing as many Jews as possible. Our first stop was Birkeneau and it was nearly impossible to get our minds around the scope of what happened there. 1.5 million people (90% of them Jews) were killed in the camp. At times, 6,000 were killed a day. 70% of the prisoners who were brought to the camp by train were immediately murdered in gas chambers made to resemble
showers. Electric lifts brought the bodies up to the crematoriums, where "special" prisoners disposed of the ashes. These special prisoners were killed periodically to prevent word of the gas chambers getting to the rest of the camp. The 30% of new arrivals who made it past those first four hour were housed and treated like animals. The standing structures of the camp, many restored, were sickening. A 1 km-long train platform surrounded by barbed wire. Barn-like buildings that housed thousands upon thousands of victims shoulder to shoulder on narrowly stacked bunks from the height of the summer to the depth of winter. The Nazis destroyed the destroyed the camp as the allies were approaching, but the vastness of the camp is represented by barrack chimneys which stand as far as the eye can see.
Where as Birkeneau was partially dismantled and feels like a ghost, Auschwitz I remains eerily intact. Similar deeds were carried out, including mass exterminations in gas chambers now set up as a memorial and open to visitors. Many of the barracks have been turned into museums paying tribute to those who were murdered in the camps. The starkest images are the rooms filled with plunder--everything
from shoes to glasses to human hair to suitcases. A man who survived the camp visited the museum some years ago and actually identified his suitcase in the exhibit. To add to the list of upsetting elements of our visit, was the fact that these people truly believed they were just being relocated. They packed their most treasured and necessary belongings--photographs, jewelry, pots and pans--only to have them stolen and sent to aid the soldiers exterminating their friends and family. Even some 30,000 children were sent back to Germany, adopted, renamed and "Germanized." Following the war, many of these children attempted to reconnect with their birth families, but were unsuccessful due to language barriers and the fact that most family left behind had been killed.
The fact that this was just one of many such death camps was overwhelming. Visiting seems like such a helpless gesture, but we're glad we did.
Advertisement
Tot: 0.082s; Tpl: 0.012s; cc: 11; qc: 52; dbt: 0.0556s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 1;
; mem: 1.2mb
Kate Donovan
non-member comment
Still loving your commentary. Also thought I would add a note regarding the concentration camp...I actually visited the Dachau concentration camp in Germany when I was 15 years old on a class trip to Europe. Your images quickly took me back to that eery experience. On that visit, I met a man who actually was liberated from Dachau by American soldiers . He was originally from Krakow, but decided to remain in the town where Dachau was located in order to return to the camp every day to re-tell his story to at least one more person, as he never wanted the story to extinguish. He was quite old when I met him and he had never missed a day. I'm glad you guys had an amazing experience there--I know visiting Dachau was something that has been seared onto my memory forever.