Week 29 - Poland Trip, Flower carpet in Brussels, Pool day

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13/8/2012

Today I set out to Charleroi to meet with the other 15 students from NZ, Argentina and Australia and set-up camp in the airport for the night, to get on an early flight tomorrow destined for Poland. After doing a bit of a man-pack, I headed off on the train journey there (around 2.5 hours). We just laxed around catching up with each other’s holiday escapades, and getting keen about our voyage to come. No sleep at all was got that night, and was reserved for the flight the next day.

14/8/2012

I guess the point where I draw the line between today and yesterday was the time that we all wearily checked in for out flight, and after a brisk security check, we were off on the plane and before no time at all, we were on our way to Poland. Being Ryanair, there was NOTHING free of charge being given out on the plane (one of the reasons the plane tickets there and back amounted to a mere 50 Euro - $75 NZD), but sleeping most of the way meant it didn’t really matter.

Upon arriving in Krakow, we were picked up by our tour guide and mini-van driver for the two days, who drove us to our modest youth hostel, which is where we’d be cooped up during our stay here. Luckily, it was right in the middle of town – just out of the main town square. We left our bags at the hostel, and after a brief rest, off we were for our first day for a tour around Krakow. We saw the grand square which is amazing, after which we visited an (apparently) very highly revered Jewish graveyard. There lay some very famous rabbis and priests, and we saw walls literally made out of headstones of broken graves. This was because as there wasn’t enough space in the graveyard (and in those days you couldn’t extend the cemetery once in the middle of the town), so what they’d do is bury people over top of the existing graves, and use the grave head to build upon the walls on the outside. We also all had to wear the traditional ‘Yarmulke’, which are those little hats Jewish men wear on their heads, for respect of the deceased, that are worn because of a sign of their god above their heads apparently. Heavy stuff….

Then we advanced to seeing that staircase that in the scene in ‘Schindler’s List’, the woman runs down to find her daughter that just narrowly escaped getting spotted by the Nazis, but a young boy working for the Nazi’s sounds an alarm before he (working to stack boxes at the bottom of the staircase) realises that it’s the mother of a young girl he likes. Then as the troops are coming, he pleads her to hide under the staircase and diverts the soldiers. This was the staircase we saw, one of the most famous in war film.

After this was visiting the true site of Schindler’s factory in Krakow, in which Oscar Schindler, during the persecution of the Polish Jews during the Second World War, housed and protected thousands of Jewish people from the torments of being sent to one of the many concentration camps in Poland, and most certainly death. Seeing the gates of the factory, and his office were deep. After seeing the film, everything really fit into place, and so many of the scenes form the film was shot here that really just brought the whole experience to life. I bought a pin here for the jacket, and with that we headed back to the hostel around 5 that afternoon. We then all had time to relax and kick back, and at around 7 we all met up and went to eat at a typical Polish diner somewhere close to the hostel. We all had free choice of what we wanted (no set menu or anything..), and the food was pretty good.

The real fun started when we had free time at night, and we all went to a bar, which turned out to be a bit of a hotspot in town, because of the fact it was a karaoke bar. This of course had us all wanting to get up and sing a song or two as the night progressed, and being the first time I’d been to a pure karaoke bar, it was a hell of a lot of fun.

15/08/2012

Waking up today, no chance of a sleep in, we all came in for breakfast and somehow made it out of the hostel to start the first (and most anticipated) tour of the trip – the Auschwitz walking tour. We arrived there around 9:30, and were greeted with a storm of other tourists trying to get in early. Once making it in, we got a first-hand look at really how bleak and grim it is inside that prison. First-off we walked around where the prisoners (Polish Jews, and soviet prisoners of war primarily) sleeping quarters were. This honestly was some of the most repugnant things I have ever seen before. Seriously, it was like a very badly kept oversized chicken coup. Many people to one (stuffed sack) mattress, often with illnesses like ‘durchfall’ (diorehhia), the smell and lack or personal space was just atrocious. They all came here, then went through a selection process (one man looked them up and down to see if they were fit to work – meaning many women, old people and children were sent straight to the gas chambers), and the ones who failed were made to undress, and go for a ‘group shower’, which as anyone who’s studies the holocaust would know was a cover up name for the gas chambers.

We then saw a pile of human hair shaved off women entering the camp, a pile of around 500 glasses taken from Jews entering the camp, and various other piles of shoes, combs and suitcases to name of few of the people who were killed here at Auschwitz. This continued to seeing places like ‘standing cells’, where prisoners who made (extremely trivial, small errors), were left in for weeks, with no ability to sit, as there were 4 people standing to a 1 meter by 1 meter cell.

After this we saw things like the ‘death wall’ where prisoners were routinely shot, sometimes up to 5 in a row with one bullet, for maximum ‘efficiency’. The last thing we did here at Auschwitz was to visit the last remaining gas chamber, where it was really fully functional, and the last one left today, as during the soviet breakthrough and overthrow of the Nazi regime, the Nazis destroyed as much evidence of the horrors that existed within the barbed fences of the concentration camps, that many of the crematoriums and gassing chambers were destroyed, leaving little to no evidence of them ever existing. Luckily for us, there were pictures taken, and survivors that testify to the almost unthinkable in-human nature of some of the things that happened there. So before we left, I decided to go against what I’m normally into, and I brought a book. After a little inspection, I found one about an eye-witness account of being to the two biggest (and most feared) concentration camps in Poland, and I decided to part with a few Zlotys and see if reading could get a renewal of interest from me.

The next place we went to was Birkenau. This is a massive camp about 3km from Auschwitz, and many times greater in size. The reason why it isn’t the most well-known, is that Auschwitz is the only camp left with a gas chamber, the rest got destroyed in the soviet overthrow. Here we took a similar tour around, and we again saw horrific things like the one bathroom, that had no soap, and no walls at all. During winter the stone seats would often become too cold to use, and the smell there was apparently understandably horrific. Prisoners typically washed once per 2 or 3 months at some times, and the spread of disease and lice was devastating too. Here was much the same thing as Auschwitz, but on a much larger scale, and lacking the gas chamber.

On our way back to the hostel, we decided to stop off at the cathedral and castle in central Krakow, where we took a look around and did the essential souvenir shopping we’re all too good at by now. Following this was getting back to the hostel, a free choice of what to grab for dinner, and another night discovering the fine Polish nightlife scene.

16/08/2012

So hard having to leave this place now. I feel like we need another two weeks here to really appreciate what Poland, and especially Krakow has to offer. We’d only really just scraped the surface of all the historical occurrences over the last two days, which meant it really sucked leaving so early. But alas, our time had come, and after some bad coffee we were on our way back to the airport again, to do all the security and luggage checks we’d grown accustomed to. Such an amazing place, a trip I’ll never forget. And although not every moment was a greatly happy and positive one, it was massively interesting, and a great way to see the very depths of in-human actions, and corrupt dictators of doctrines that just spiral way out of hand.

18/08/2012

Today was the ‘Carpet of Flowers’ show in Brussels, which only happens once every two years here in Brussels. This is basically when the entire Grand Place in Brussels is intricately laid with thousands of flowers, usually resembling some kind of pattern or art signifying some kind of specific theme. I got there around 3, and met Josie, Lydia, Chris, and Chris Hall there. We had a few beers in Celtica, and then had a bit of a Tiki-Tour around Brussels, which ended up in us gravitating towards a certain familiar park for us, where we kicked back for the rest of the arvo.

19/08/2012

Chris Hall, Lydia, Josie and I decided to head to Josie’s first host families grandparents’ house today, and just relax and swim all afternoon, of course with a few aperitifs never too far away. It was a scorcher here in Belgium today – 35 degrees. This meant my family was staying sat home as it was almost too hot to move. I almost collapsed from heat and exhaustion in the bus from the gare in Liege to her house on my way there, it was really that hot. But a perfectly spent afternoon is all I can conclude, and with a whole 4 or 5 weeks of holidays to catch up on, we weren’t short of conversations at all.

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