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I am struggling to lift my head off the pillow this morning, having been woken up by the maids at about 9am and then falling back into a restless sleep again. For once in our lives we've actually prepared ourselves for our journey by double checking google maps and writing down extra instructions on which way to go, so fingers crossed we don't get too lost today. We’ve heard Poland is notoriously difficult to drive in, so we need all the help we can get. The down side to the first part of our drive is there is no direct motorway to where we are going, so we have to try and navigate lots of little roads instead. The European road map we brought doesn't seem to have any of these little roads on the map so by writing directions down we should hopefully survive another day.
We head off optimistically and it seems to go well for the first half hour as we follow the directions religiously, but as you've guessed it, we make a wrong turn somewhere and end up at the bottom of a ski resort!? We both know that we certainly shouldn't be driving through any
Hitler's Motto
"Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work makes you free). ski resorts (not until December anyway) so we have to retrace our steps to where we think it has all gone wrong. Eventually we make it back onto the right road and at the next service station we decide, rather sensibly, to invest in a more detailed map of Poland, as we can't afford to get lost every two minutes. Once we have the map, things get a lot easier and we manage to make our way to Ociwiem, where the famous Auschwitz concentration camp was.
It's a really interesting but eery place, especially as we see a massive display of human hair cut off from the women who were gassed in the chambers, as well as the actual ruins of the gas chambers themselves. It's amazing the amount of people who were actually killed here, including over a million Jews who were mainly taken from Hungary and Poland. What the museum points out as well though, is that initially the camp was mainly aimed at detaining and torturing Poles who were deemed a threat to the German army, and the mass genocide of jews there only began a few years later. Wow, check me the history buff, although
I dare say my fellow history teacher friends out there will no doubt read this and correct me on the finer points. It's a really heavy but fascinating day, and I'm grateful I've had a chance to experience and see such a massive part of history.
We continue on to Wroclaw, and manage to find the hotel easily- is this the start of a new trend for us? It has a swimming pool which is still open by the time we arrive, so we nip for a quick swim before nipping to the hotel restaurant for some food. I have a soup with meat dumplings followed by a chicken salad, and Greg has a pork schnitzel which is almost the size of my head, accompanied with roast potatoes and sauerkraut, Greg’s all time favourite. Guess what we do next? Oh don’t be so rude! Yep, a few hours of mind numbing tv before bed.
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