Poland....the trip so far

This blog comes to you from high up on a snowy mountain in Poland where Daniel and I are in the midst of  a 3-day bus tour with a bunch of Hungarians. We left Máriapócs at 6am yesterday and a little over six hours later, we arrived here at our hotel in the Tatra Mountains. The Tatras are the highest mountain range of the Carpathians and they form a natural border between Slovakia and Poland.

Having seen the last of our snow in Máriapócs disappear in recent weeks, we were somewhat unprepared for the sight of snow on the mountains here. I guess we figured that if it wasn't snowing anymore in Máriapócs, then it wouldn't be snowing anywhere else either. Wrong! This was a bit of a problem as we didn't really pack appropriate clothes for our trip. Still, we've managed to make do with what we have so far, and we hardly even notice our frozen toes anymore.

Yesterday, after settling in briefly at our hotel, we reboarded the bus and set off for the Polish town of Zakopane, the unofficial 'Winter Capital' of Poland. When we arrived in Zakopane we immediately departed on a four hour mountain hike. While parts of the trail were icy and muddy, the scenery was quite lovely, and our guide was able to tell us a lot about the local area. The trail ended at a partially frozen waterfall near an isolated and misty mountain valley. 

 

After our walk, we returned to the hotel, ate a fantastic Polish dinner in the hotel's freaky restaurant filled with stuffed animals (including an evil weasel) and then crashed into bed by 8:30pm.

This morning we were up and on the road again by 7am. This time our destination was Krakow, the second largest city in Poland. We began our tour of Krakow by wandering around the Wawel Castle. Daniel and I were particularly impressed when we came upon the castle's very own fire-breathing dragon. We also found his cave nearby.

   
From the castle, we wandered along the city's laneways until we came to the Main Market Square where we spent some time browsing through the stalls in the marketplace. We also admired the uniqueness of St Mary's Basilica, a large church located on the edge of the Square. One of the women in our tour group told us that the church has two different spires because each one was designed by a different architect. She explained that the architects were also brothers and they were involved in a fierce competition with one another to see who could design and build the tallest spire. If you look at the church, you can see that one brother emerged as the clear victor. Apparently this is because he killed his sibling before the construction was completed. Nice.

From Krakow we set off in a westerly direction towards the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camps. I wasn't really sure what to expect from our visit to Auschwitz. Everything that I have read and heard about it describes it as a place of nightmares, a hellish reminder of one of the darkest chapters in human history. So it was a little weird to find it crawling with tourists chowing down on sandwiches and talking in loud voices about how cold they were. Daniel and I managed to hook up with an English-speaking tour group and we set off on a very confronting journey around the original basecamp. Our guide lead us through several of the original buildings which once housed prisoners, but which have now been converted into a large-scale museum. On the tour we learned that of the 1.3 million people sent to the various parts of the Auschwitz camps, approximately 1.1 million were killed. Of these, approximately 1 million (90%) were Jews. We also learned that almost half of the Jews killed at Auschwitz were from Hungary.

The video below shows part of a display at the museum in Auschwitz. It is basically a long room filled with shoes taken from prisoners as they arrived in the camp. Our guide told us that there are approximately 40,000 pairs of shoes in the display. This represented just four days worth of arrivals. It was sickening. I really can't find any other words to describe it.

We also walked through an area that was once used as a gas chamber and saw some of the ovens where the bodies were cremated. I noticed that many areas of the camp had small shrines like the one in the picture on the left. It was a reminder that the horrors of Auschwitz are still very much present in people's lives and that the crimes that were committed there, and the people who died there, won't be soon forgotten.

After the basecamp tour, we caught a bus to the second part of the camp which is known as Birkenau. This was much more like what I had imagined Auschwitz would look like. There were long rows of huts in which those 'lucky' enough to survive were housed. We glimpsed the appalling conditions that they were forced to live in - the 3-tiered bunk beds which would sleep up to 24 people, the lack of heating, the lack of insulation, the lack of toilet facilities, the lack of dignity.

There was also a long central yard containing a train line. This allowed trains to travel right in to the camp to deliver prisoners. We saw the place where the SS doctors stood to 'assess' those who arrived, motioning in one direction to allow a small number of people to enter the camp and in another direction to condemn large numbers of people to death in the numerous gas chambers. We walked along the same path that hundreds of thousands of people had walked before us, many of them suspecting or even knowing that they were taking their final footsteps, others innocently believing that they were headed for communal showers and other promises that didn't exist.

All in all, visiting Auschwitz was not a fun experience. In fact, it was heartbreaking. But I'm still glad that I went. Hopefully tomorrow's final day of activities in Poland will be a little more lighthearted.

- Amanda