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Published: June 14th 2008
It's soup festival time
Luckily our visit coincided with the Annual Soup Festival. Yee ha! Obviously still made the old fashioned way too... Like thousands of others, we made the morning trip out to Gatwick airport so we could flee the rotten weather for the Bank Holiday weekend.
After the most crappy flight ever (stuck at the back of the plane with a huge group of noisy high school kids, AND the most horrific take-off possible with the plane dropping and passengers screaming… but don’t even get me started about that!) we made it to Krakow.
Krakow itself was a nice enough place, but it didn’t really knock our socks off. There were certainly some pretty buildings in the old town and it had an interesting Jewish Quarter but perhaps our expectations were slightly too high.
We did however really enjoy the food, exploring the old streets, the outdoor photography exhibitions, the churches and the people watching. The people were all friendly and the place just seemed so incredibly quiet and relaxed compared to London. The Market Square (meant to be the biggest in Europe) is surrounded by lovely restaurants but I found the small market in the Jewish Quarter to be more atmospheric.
Krakow’s two famous (or infamous) sites to visit are the Salt Mines at Wieliczka and of course,
Innocent bystander
It probably means something completely different in Polish.. but had to snap this photo anyway... the notorious Auschwitz.
We were expecting a bit of a ‘Wookey Hole’ experience at the Salt Mines and were pleasantly surprised. For 900 years, salt was incredibly valuable to the region and the mines were an absolutely massive industry. There are about 300km of tunnels underground and you begin your trip by walking 150m down wooden stairs. Underground there are displays on the history of mining (some were VERY tacky - look out for the Gnomes!) a few lakes and an impressive cathedral made entirely out of salt. The miners carved everything themselves including the chandeliers!
And of course Auschwitz.
Auschwitz was everything I feared it would be. Sickening, overwhelming and sad, sad, sad. The extent of the meticulous killing regime is clear from the way Auschwitz is so deliberately laid out. From the carefully organised barracks to the torture chambers and the ever-present watch towers - everything was planned for the maximum disposal of life. The efficiency of the place was chilling.
We had a lovely guide show us around the camp. We visited pretty much the same horrific places as everyone else. The photographs were haunting and the room containing over two tonnes of human hair
Lunch...
Don't know what they were, but they were cheap and everyone else seemed to be eating them... was just too unreal to take in. I found the carefully marked suitcases and belongings of the victims to be the most upsetting. Every carefully marked case, every shoe, pair of glasses… child’s dress and doll… each item was a life that ended in murder. Both Chris and I cried openly - I don’t know how people managed not to!
The behaviour of some visitors was really surprising. At one stage we came to a firing wall where tens of thousands of people had been murdered. Flowers and wreaths had been left. A Jewish group was saying prayers and crying by the wall. It didn’t stop a few tourists jumping in and taking photos. People also flouted the no photography rule inside the barracks. Not really sure why people did this but it seemed pretty tasteless!
We also visited the Birkenau Camp (Auschwitz II) which is a few kilometres away from Auschwitz. Birkenau was the extermination camp and was capable of killing up to 20,000 people everyday. The size of Birkenau totally blew us away. It was absolutely massive. This place must have been utter hell on earth. The wooden barracks (originally constructed as stables for horses) could
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Krakow Old Town have housed up to a thousand people each. While most of them have been destroyed, many still stand and Birkenau has an even more grim and foreboding feeling than Auschwitz.
Overall, I am very glad that we visited Auschwitz. We certainly learnt a whole lot about our recent history and from the sound of the accents around us, there were huge numbers of Kiwis and Aussies there also.
As we left, I overheard a lady asking a guide “How could the Germans have done this?” his reply was worth noting “This was carried out by human beings - that’s the important thing. We cannot forget that”
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Nic
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Those sausages....
Hey guys. Always good to read about your travels. Weather here is yuk yuk yuk. Take care and lots of love.