A Day at Auschwitz

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I bought the bus ticket for 9.30 but I missed the bus by almost 30 minutes. This happens a lot, I keep having to rebook tickets, be it plane, bus, or train.

I caught the 10.30 bus instead, which was so full that some people stood for the whole ride, and arrived at the Auschwitz Museum a bit after noon. The entry was free, but to join the English speaking tour cost 26 zl.

Everytime I join a tour, I end up regretting it, and today was no different. The tour guide lady was very nice and knew everything, but we were lead from one historical spot to the next without really stopping.

What did I think of it?

I have mixed feelings.

First of all, it's not as "solemn" of a place as I had imagined it would be, and I hadn't expected to be in such a crowd. Maybe I'm too uptight, but I thought some of the tourists were some what disrespectful. Going to see Auschwitz isn't like going to the park or a regular museum. but there were people posing for photos in front of the display of human hair, the display of the gas cannisters, in front of the cells... I mean, people died here! Why would anyone want a photo of themselves in front of a pile of human hair??

IMHO, that's tacky and almost... distasteful? I know that I don't want a momento of me in front of the shorn hair of thousands of murdered Poles and Jews...

Second of all, I think I mentally way over-prepared myself for the visit. When I was there and I saw what I expected to see, but/and not much worse, it was almost a "let down"?
Ok, I know this sounds bad and I should probably tiptoe around the words a bit in order to not sound disrespectful (keep reading)...

I've known and read quite a bit already about these things before seeing the camps so that whenever I encountered a display, my reaction wasn't so much

"oh my god, how horrible, I can't believe it", it was more
"ohyeah, I remember reading about this".

So in that sense it was a "let down", that I wasn't introduced to that much newer information from the trip.

What was new, however, was the opportunity to walk around the camps (Auschwitz and Birkenau) and see the amount of land that they covered and get a sense of the scale of things. The camps are huge, much bigger than I had imagined, and they looked so peaceful (bordering the forest). And the cremetoria are small, hard for me to imagine that they were big enough to have done the job.

Anyhow, I have a few photos, mostly of details (I'm into that) but really, it's Auschwitz -- everything that's worth shooting has been shot. There's not a new angle to be discovered for photographing the guardtower, and everything you could possibly want to see you can find on the internet.

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Comments

[Vala]

Auschwitz
My experience was very similar to yours. I was not as shocked as I should have been, because I had read so much and seen movies and programs about it. Still I got a very creepy feeling downstairs where the cellars are. Oh I should have stayed longer to learn more Polish. Now I envy you - and miss you of course a great deal! Take care. Vala

[Carly]

I had a much worse experience when visiting Dachau concentration camp. I met a man from my home town (huge coincidence, from a tiny town in the midwest) and he FLIRTED with me in the crematorium. I think I almost found his disrespect and disregard for what happened there to be more disturbing than knowing what happened there back then.