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Published: November 7th 2009
no entry last night, i was busy socializing but i'llg et to that in a minute. this is gonna be a long one so prepare yourselves.
night before last just hung out, went for a walk, nothing too exciting and went ot bed kidna early as usual. got up before 7 so i could shower and get ready to catch the 800 express train to warsaw for the day. 3 hours each way makes for a long day trip but ir eally wanted to get there to see both the communistic areas and the completely rebuilt old town that was totally destroyed in WWII.
when i got to the train station it was exactly what i pictured soviet life to be like. the station is MASSIVE, mostly underground, with walkways and hallways going everywhere, everything dark and grey with minimal signage. when i finally made it outside, i was greeted by the "palace of culture and science", the tallest building in poland. it was a gift from stalin. kindof similar to the empire state building to me but not near as tall. anyways i didnt' go in because it didn't sound like there was anythign worth going in for otherthan the viewing platform but since the top third of the building was shrouded in fog i skipped that too. walked down jerusalem street which was wide, busy, not pedestrian friendly. but they do have underground passages that go under the cross streets which is nice. got a delicious cinnamon bun down there for 50 cents.
headed out to the "royal way" which is the streets the royals used to use to go from their regular home to the summer home. they've got it all done up with nice wide sidewalks, and cafes and shops lining it. at the first interesection there is a huge fake palm tree in the middle of all the traffic. anyways, walked up the road towards the old town. alon the way saw lots of statues (charles de gaulle, polish poets, polish heros, and my favorite copernicus in front of hte national academy of science. just up the street from there is hte church of the holy cross, inside which is Chopin's heart. weird. but the church was closed for some reason (there were signs posted but in polish only so i was out of luck). Then up past the university and a little side trip to Pilsudski Square. a huge square which feels mostly empty. there was a nice tomb of the unknown solider there thugh, adn a pretty little park on the other side called saxon gardens. apparantly back 4-500 yeras ago poland was mostly ruled by foreign kings, chosen by the elite of poland. they liked to spend more money on parks and their own palaces than on anything that would really benefit the people. hence lots of parks and statues and such.
anyways finally made it up to the old town. asi said the whole city, pretyt much every single building was destroyed in the war. they almost decided to rebuild elsewhere but finally decided to rebuild the entire city, as it was, from photos and memory. they did a great job, i thought it was beautiful. it felt a little artificial, kinda like a medieval theme park but still, better than building the whole place in the commie way! the old town centeres on castle square where, you guessed it, thers a castel. the royal castle. i didn't go inside, my guidebook said it was ho hum
walked through the old town on the quiet side streets into the old town market square. not much going on there this time of year, but a few people around, nice people watching, some musician buskers for ambiance. a mermaid fountain in the center of the square. theres a legend that a mermaid lived in the vistula river that serenaded the city.
walked out through the barbican gate, where the walls used to surround the old city, and into the "new town" which, of course is the same age as everything else (from the 50's rebuilt) but was the first spot built outside the old walls back in teh day. nothing too interesting there either. a square with a so so church.
and that was my time in warsaw. grabbed some quick kfc for lunch so i could get back to the train station to catch the train ta 315. so i wanted to buy a ticket. go into the train station and the lineup is crazy. like 200 people in front of me at least. but i remembered seeing more ticket booths throughout the labyrinth underground so i went down there and managed to do it in less than 5 minutes! travel victory. however she told me there was no 315 train, so i booked the 415. with an hour to waste i headed over to the big new shopping mall next door and hada look around. and some pistachio ice cream. yum.
found the train no problem and back to krakow around 730. overall i didn't think too much of warsaw, glad i didn't spend more than a few hours there walking around, but i'm still glad i went. its not a pretty city but you can still feel the fingers of the soviets in certain parts, and seeing the great job of reconstruction was good.
booked my tour of auschwitz when i got back to the hostel. and enjoyed free hot dogs for supper provided by the hostel. they're having free polish food for supper tonite too, this hostel rocks! greg adn toms in krakow, good place. also cheap phone rates, like 1 cent a minute ot canada on their "internet phone".
anyways, last night was mad dog night. hot dogs for supper, then all you can drink "mad dog" shots for 25 zlotys (8ish bucks). i wasn't going to, but they forced me in to it (yeah really had to twist my arm)... anyways a mad dog shot is half raspberry syrup, half vodka with a squirt of tobasco sauce. there were 8 of us there. can't remember most of the names mostly because we were playing with "international rules" where you're not allowed to point, use real names, say the word "drink" and a few others. two guys from sydney australia who were getting a train at 10pm but had a few drinks with us first. kate from australia whos living and working in london. alex, a girl from england, alex and doug from windsor ontario, another guy from santiago chile... sitting around, chatting drinking watching tv playing cards. good fun.
stayed up till about 2, which is about 4 hours later than any other night i've been up yet haha and i had my auschwitz tour for 945 this morning!
but ig ot up no trouble and had a little nap on the bus on the way. its just over an hour from the city.
so auschwitz. it was really moving. i booked a tour which is something i don't normally do but i just wan'st in the mood to try to figure out the buses and trains. plus its not just one camp, but two (three really but two for visiting) a few kms apart. we started at auschwitz I, the smaller of the two. its got the Arbeit Macht Fei (work sets you free or similar nazi bull$?IT) gate there.
so before WWII, it was a polish army camp. hitler converted it to a camp for his polish political enemies. there were good train connections so he figured it would be a good place to get rid of all the people he considered undesirable - jews, gays, gypsys, political enemys, POW's, etc. there were a bunch of barracks there, and they had a few set up with different exhibits in each. some showing how the people were killed, some showing what conditions were like for people that lived there. they had posters the germans made announcing in peoples hometowns how they would be rounded up, and go to auschwitz before finding where in eastern europe they would be resettled....
pictures of the train platforms. the tracks ran right into the middle of the birkenau camp and the people would get off the train adn be 'greeted' by the nazi soldiers and a doctor. they would go through all the people and separate them based on if they were fit to do work or not. this is where families were ripped apart forever. young healthy men and some women generally went to live in the camp to work. children, pregnant women, the elderly, disabled or anyone too weak/sick/starved from the train ride there were sent straight to the gas chamber. one of hte rooms had a huge model of the Birkenau (Auschwitz II - the other side of town) crematorium, showing how in one underground room the people were to take off all their clothes tog et ready for shower/decontamination. they had numbered hooks on the wall where they hung their clothes, and were encouraged to remember their # so they could get the clothes after. 2000 at a time herded into the big "shower" room where they were packed in like sardines and locked in. then, above ground through a couple of chimneys, the nazis would drop in the zyklon B poison and kill them all. then the bodies were taken out and burnt. horrific.
the germans took all the prisoners belongings and even shaved their heads before this. anyone going to the camp got their prisoner number tatooed on to them. they had to wear a symbol on their shirt based on what group they belonged to - jew/gay/pow/etc. so all the stuff they took from the people went to places called Kanada I and II - nicknamed after Canada apparantly b/c everyone thought of canada as a wealthy nation. they had big displays of thousands of pairs of shoes, eye glasses, combs, shoe brushes... and the worst thing at the whole camp for me was the hair. there was one display just FULL of hair. 4400 lbs apparantly in that one spot, and that only a small fraction of what had been 'harvested'. then another display showing the fabric made from all the hair. nothing was wasted, those efficient germans reused/recycled everything for the war effort. oh right also the suitcases were pretty bad. with peoples names and hometowns and birthdates written on them. thousands of suitcases...
pretty much all through the place are pictures of the prisoners. at first they photographed everyone until there were too many to handle so they stopped. anyone who was "selected" to work in the camp lasted an average of 2-3 months before they died of starvation, or disease. the pictures show they're all bald, wearing the same striped uniform. then there were lots of disturbing pictures. kids having undergone medical experiments. women emaciated to the point of death. pictures of one woman who was down to 25kg. 55 lbs!!!! that is insane. so sickly looking. all hte kids iwth their ribs sticking out and bellys swollen up. pictures of piles of bodies of people who had just starved to death. thye were supposed to be fed about 1500 calories per day (not enough, especially since they worked 10-12 hr days of hard labor), but oftren got less. some watery soup with potatoes, a piece of bread usually made with chestnuts or sawdust, coffee... bodies just piled up outside, with snow falling on them, or birds picking at them. really disturbing.
outside between two of hte barracks was the execution wall. before they got the gas chambers on the go, they lined up people and shot them in the back of hte head. then burned the bodies of course. they had a speicla wall made so the bullets wouldnt' ricochet.
one of the barracks was called "death block". if you went in there that was it. they would have a "trial" which lasted about 2 minutes each, made to undress, then brought downstairs to the various cells. there was a starvation cell where people got put if someone else had escaped the camp. they were just left to starve slowly to death. a polish priest, maksymilian kolbe offered to take the place of one of the ten men who was selected to go because he was worried about who would care for his faimly. the nazis agreed and locked kolbe and 9 others in the starvation room. when they opened the door 2 weeks later, he was still alive (the only one). when people got word he was a live he was an inspiration. and the germans couldn't have that so they killed him by lethal injection.
other cells included the dark cell which had 30 people packed in and just one small hole for ventilation. they often suffocated especially if there was snow which blocked the air. in the standing cell 4 people at a time were put into a very VERY small square of bricks and left there for hours and hours.
then we went to the crematorium/gas chamber. therew as just one at the smaller of hte camps, and could only burn 350 peopel a day so thats why they eventually built way more at the second, much bigger birkenau camp.
then we caught the bus over to the second camp, which was just a quick visit really. its massive. 2 square km but not too much to see as the nazis destroyed most of it before they left. one barrack full of toilets... well, huge long rows of concrete slabs with holes in them and space below forw ater to flow through. the holes were spaced about a foot apart. zero privacy, adn appraantly the cement toilets were only there a year or two at the end. before that itw as juts a dirt ground trench. must have been horrifying. they were only allowed to go twice a day, and they had about 2000 people using them so they only got a second to do their business. the nazis wouldn't go near the toilet houses for fear of disease (rightly so) so this was where the resistance and black markets operated.
there were 5 or 6 (i think) crematoria at the back of the camp. they're destroyed and nothing to see now. but they had capacity to destroy 4400 lives every day. there was a small pond behind there where they uncerimoniously dumped all hte ashes.
so statistics. 1.3 million people brought to the camp between 1941 and 1945. 1.1 million of them dead. mostly polish jews, but people from all over europe: france, norway, greece, hungary, czechoslovakia, germany, netherlands, etc etc etc. its hard to wrap your head around the numbers. they're just so staggering.
the soviets finally arrived in january 1945 and liberated the camps. but by then the nazis knew they were coming and destroyed as much as they could to leave no evidence. they didn't do a good enough job. but they also got most of the prisoners to march further west into germany in "death marches"... the sick, starving people didn't do well with this, and huge numbers died along thew ay.
our guide was also telling us about how the local people (no one lived right next to it, the germans made sure of that) but even a few miles away there would be horrible smells... appraantly the burning bodies smelled like almonds from the zyklonB gas used to kill them
anyways it was a really moving experience. i saw a few people crying and pretty much everyone was just walking around pale and quiet. i went ot dachau outside munich before, adn it was a similar experience. but the birkenau camp was desinged for death, and they made full use of it. people were just herded there and sent straight to death. the ones given a 'reprieve' by being sent ot work were just in for a slower death from starvation or disease.
immediately after the war it was decided to turn everything into a museum so that the world would not forget. and i don't think the world could forget (excpet for crazies like that iran guy who denies the holocaust)... to think that went on and in the lifetimes of people still alive today. seeing flowers and candles at some of the pictures was a stark reminder that there are still survivors who knew people there, fathers, grandfathers, brothers, sisters... 1.1 million. thats more than twice the population of newfoundland. killed for no reason (no good reason anyways)...
sick.
anyways enough about that. i hope i painted somewhat of a picture of what it was like. the tour was kind of rushed so i never got a chance to read a lot of the posters or have a good look at some of the displays. but the hair.... definately the worst part for me. brings some reality to it and it will be with me forever.
uneventful bus ride back to town and now waiting for some polish food cooked by the hostel for supper. plane to munich at 630 tomororw, have to get up around 4 to catch a train to the airport.
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Nan
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You sure did the scene justice with your description Jason. There's many a dark period in our past history but when you think of it,, surely this must be THE darkest/ In Britain we were seeing pictures of the poor prisoners, swollen bellies, emaciated bodies, looks of despair on their faces and those were the few who somehow survived. It's really horrifying -- I agree and so very disturbing. At the same time, I think it's also important that people should SEE the evidence of Nazi barbarism and be thankful to God for the brave souls that sacrificed their lives to put an end to it. Armistice Day will soon be here --REMEMBER THEM.