The Road to Budapest - Day 10

30/03/09
Another early morning and another day of travelling. We got picked up in a van and were driven through awesome country side, along winding roads and then out onto the open highway. We stopped once we were in Poland to change over currency again, and then stopped again later for lunch at a roadside restaurant. We then carried on and made it to Auschwitz by early afternoon where we had a guide to take us around the site. The day was overcast and occasionally raining, which set a sombre mood for the emotional day. They have turned the buildings there into Museums and have many photos taken during the time they held people there, and they also have personal items and other remnants on display. The guide we had was very good and explained the events with passion and emotion. I am going to explain some of the things I saw at Auschwitz, so some may not want to keep reading, but I found it quite emotional and would like to share the experience.
I have seen many documentaries on Auschwitz and what occurred during the time of the Nazis, but to actually be there, where it happened and to see the photos and belongings of those who passed through the gates made it quite real and emotional. They had maps showing the distances the Jews travelled in horrific conditions on board the trains, and then photos of them finally stepping off the trains into the grounds of Auschwitz I or Auschwitz II- Birkenau and then being separated from their family. The mind games that they being put through was hard to handle. They were constantly being told that they were being prepared for re-location to start a new life elsewhere; like being told to label their suitcase to make it easier to find later (they have some of the suitcases on display), or being told to remember the number above the hook they put their clothes on, so they can find them quickly later. Instead, they were either subject to immediate death, or a slow long death from fatigue, starvation and dehydration.
They have photos on display of people after they had cut off their hair – the women looked like men, and the children looked terrified. A room was dedicated the children, and was filled with infant clothing and booties, with photos of them huddled together looking scared. They changed the process from just taking photos to imprinting each person with a tattoo number, as the faces of the people changed so rapidly from poor conditions. They have rooms full of shoes, suitcases, brushes, glasses, kitchen utensils and other such items. A room was even filled with hair that was to be bundled into sacks and sent away to become the lining in gloves and other clothing that the SS would later be wearing. One of the rooms detailed the medical experiments that were conducted – one example was the experiments on twins. We viewed some of the sleeping rooms – showing a room with thin blankets on the floor and a photo taken at the time with people lying side by side on the floor. Other rooms had bunks, and the rooms where the prisoners who helped the guards lived had stretcher beds, robes and a desk. We were then shown a room where they sent some people (I think it was like a punishment room) – after a full day of working on their feet, they were sent to a room about 1 metre square where they had to crawl through a small opening to get into the room. They would put four people in this room; they had to stand for the entire night; there was no light; there was only a very small hole for ventilation and there was nowhere for waste to go.
We then went to one of the gas chambers where the pretend shower pipes were still on the ceiling, and you could see the hole where they dropped the gas tins down from. Next we walked through one of the crematoriums.
After Auschwitz we took a short drive to Auschwitz II - Birkenau. Birkenau was the largest of the Nazi’s concentration/extermination camps and some of the buildings on display remain untouched, so we can view them as they were. The walk from one end of the camp to the other was so long, it was hard to see the end. There is a memorial at the end of the train line which has remembrance plates in many languages, as the devastating act on humanity has touched so many lives across many cultures. We walked along the train line, where could mainly just see the chimneys of the wooden building that once stood there. After they shut Birkenau down (Auschwitz I was the camp that stayed open until the end of the war) they removed a lot of the wooden buildings with the view of building another camp elsewhere in Europe. We stopped in the middle of the train line where two paths lead away from the train line out past where the buildings stood. There is a photo on display there where a group of elderly men are being lined up and are having their details recorded. The guide asked us where the photo was taken; we looked and we were standing where the men were once standing – it was a very strange feeling.
We continued down the train track and then visited some of the wooden buildings that have been kept for viewing. The first building was for showering and the use of toilets. They were allowed to shower and use the toilets twice a day – once before work and once after – and for only a few minutes. The toilet was along concrete bench with two rows of holes cut out of it, so they would have been touching the person behind them and had no privacy. The next building we visited was a sleeping room. It was full of wooden bunk beds pushed together – they had to sleep in the same clothes they worked in, and had to make their beds every day. I left Birkenau feeling numb.
The drive continued on to Krakow, which is where we are going to spend the next two nights.
That night we went for a walk through the centre of town and then had dinner at a cute little restaurant. They served great food and I had another traditional food – cabbage roll with rice and meat inside, covered in a tomato based sauce, with spinach and pickled beetroot on the side. Afterwards we went to a small bar that had great music playing and served scrumptious hot wine.