Day 4: Auschwitz-Birkenau
Got up early today even without setting my alarm clock and enjoyed a nice grilled cheese breakfast before setting out to try to get to Auschwitz-Birkenau. After spending a while trying to navigate the train station with no English signage I finally found a tourist info booth and got directions to the train station and instructions how to get to Oswiecem. After a quick sprint to make it to a bus due to leave in 15 minutes, I was on my way to one of history's infamous locations.
So what to make of Auschwitz? It's not a fun place to visit, obviously, but I'm definitely glad I went. While I wasn't overcome by emotion as much as I thought I might, there were still some moments that just hit you in the gut. In particular, a whole room piled high with the hair cut off the victims of the gas chamber was a chilling sight, as were the rooms filled with mundane items like shoes, glasses, and cookware taken from the arriving prisoners. One of the weirdest things that struck me is how pretty a lot of the grounds of the camp are. When the sun breaks through and the birds are singing, the tree-lined roads between the bunkers are almost peaceful, though once you remember where you are it's disconcerting.
More striking for me was visiting Birkenau, the nearby camp where most of the exterminations actually took place. What got me most was the sheer scale of the site; bunkers the size of barns stretch out by the dozens in rows upon rows, for hundreds of metres. Most of the bunkers were burned down by the Nazis as they tried to destroy any evidence of the camp before the arrival of the Red Army, so all that's left of the wooden buildings are their brick chimneys. Dozens of them stand in eerie silence like some strange ancient ruin.
By the time I got back to Krakow it was after 7, so there wasn't much to see or do, so I just walked around in the streets around the Rynek Glowny for a while and grabbed dinner at a Georgian restaurant. (For those keeping score, I did manage to catch what's becoming my traditional afternoon nap when I slept through most of the bus ride back from Oswiecem.) After dark, I was able to get some really nice photos of the buildings in the square and some of the monuments nearby.
Once again I was planning on heading to bed early tonight, but there's a party going on in the hostel common room and people are enticing me to go. Hopefully I won't stay up too late, since I'll be trying to get up early tomorrow to go out to the salt mines at Wieliczka in the morning and still get back in time to catch a night-bus to Budapest.
So what to make of Auschwitz? It's not a fun place to visit, obviously, but I'm definitely glad I went. While I wasn't overcome by emotion as much as I thought I might, there were still some moments that just hit you in the gut. In particular, a whole room piled high with the hair cut off the victims of the gas chamber was a chilling sight, as were the rooms filled with mundane items like shoes, glasses, and cookware taken from the arriving prisoners. One of the weirdest things that struck me is how pretty a lot of the grounds of the camp are. When the sun breaks through and the birds are singing, the tree-lined roads between the bunkers are almost peaceful, though once you remember where you are it's disconcerting.
More striking for me was visiting Birkenau, the nearby camp where most of the exterminations actually took place. What got me most was the sheer scale of the site; bunkers the size of barns stretch out by the dozens in rows upon rows, for hundreds of metres. Most of the bunkers were burned down by the Nazis as they tried to destroy any evidence of the camp before the arrival of the Red Army, so all that's left of the wooden buildings are their brick chimneys. Dozens of them stand in eerie silence like some strange ancient ruin.
By the time I got back to Krakow it was after 7, so there wasn't much to see or do, so I just walked around in the streets around the Rynek Glowny for a while and grabbed dinner at a Georgian restaurant. (For those keeping score, I did manage to catch what's becoming my traditional afternoon nap when I slept through most of the bus ride back from Oswiecem.) After dark, I was able to get some really nice photos of the buildings in the square and some of the monuments nearby.
Once again I was planning on heading to bed early tonight, but there's a party going on in the hostel common room and people are enticing me to go. Hopefully I won't stay up too late, since I'll be trying to get up early tomorrow to go out to the salt mines at Wieliczka in the morning and still get back in time to catch a night-bus to Budapest.
posted by Carlos at 10:52 PM
1 Comments:
You know, by the time I was done emailing and blogging the party had moved outside (presumably to bars and pubs), so I didn't get to go. I did hear bits and pieces as drunken people arrived back to our room, and at one point one of the girls had convinced the hostel employee that she was filming a BBC documentary and woke me up during a "tour" of the facilities, and of course in the morning overhead hungover regrets from the participants.
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