The city (like so many European cities) opens out into a large square lined with restaurants and in this weather, children making the most of fountains about the place. The children were wearing bathers splashing around in the water, while many others were reading books and dipping their feet in or watching the kids. I suppose it seems strange because we'd just go to the beach - and honestly, I wanted to join them.
Maybe it's my British blood, but I instantly broke out in a heat rash and had the itchiest five days of my life. What am I going to be like when we get back to Australia?! We decided to head over to Wawel Royal Castle after a walk around the old town.
The castle opened out into vast area with huge grounds, including castle ruins as a garden feature. People have lived on Wawel Hill as early as fifty-thousand years ago! It just blows my mind.
We retired to our Hotel after a really good day out in the city. Poland is super cheap! We went to a fancy restaurant with Master Chef style food along with a few cocktails as well as dessert. Not a bad way to end the day...
The next day we became super tourists. Not only did we manage to sleep in, but we visited Oscar Schindler's factory, the Jewish Quarter, and both Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps a few hours away all in one very long day.
Oscar Schindler's factory was visually very impressive. The displays - while incredible, didn't contain a lot of information about the display itself. Sometimes there was no information at all - it was a bit of a guessing game really. Kind of like this room Joe is standing in with spinning poles...
It was a 45 minute walk back to the train station, through the Jewish Quarter. The buildings were like this the whole way, through sadly many were pretty run down. We walked past a queue that stretched the length of an entire block waiting for ice-cream. I love ice-cream, but I'm not sure standing in 40 degree heat for an hour, waiting for ice-cream is the right way to cool down.
Seeing the concentration camps was a last minute decision we made that morning, so it was a fair bit of running around to find out how to actually there. We saw an advertisement for an express bus and headed for the station. I can't remember a time when air conditioning has ever felt so good.
Auschwitz I - The first camp had many of the museums and displays of what life was like for the people held here. In the photo above we saw many images of people walking between the barbed-wire fences as they arrived at the camp. Women and children wouldn't normally make selection, and women that did survive were often test subjects for medical experiments. I won't go into detail.
This is the crematorium - it has been partially rebuilt to show what the exterior looked like. Around the camp are information boards explaining different aspects of life here. In many parts of the camp, such as this crematorium it's important to remain silent out of respect for the people that died here.
It's kind of eerie walking around the camp with so many other people, and not hearing anyone speak. Again, without going into detail, what the people endured here is so hard to accept as being real. The humiliation, pain and human suffering the Nazis inflicted on people - I can't find the words to describe how it makes you feel.
There were huge displays of human hair, spectacles, hair brushes, shoes, suitcases and other personal effects - this was first real understanding I had of how many people lost their lives here. 1.1 Million people were murdered in Auschwitz.
The most heartbreaking displays are usually those showing children's clothes, or their photographs where they're smiling back at the camera - unaware of what was to come.
We caught the shuttle bus to Auschwitz II - We walked into this baron land that basically consisted of barracks, row after row, as far as the eye can see... and in the extreme heat (as opposed to the extreme cold when we visited the camp in Dachau) the weather just gives you some idea of the conditions that must have very quickly deteriorated people both mentally and physically. We saw a photo of this road (which was a few kilometers long) with prisoners marching in the heat - men, women and children. To the left you can see railway lines... they would transport large groups of people straight to the gas chambers at the end of this road.
The gas chambers were destroyed by the Nazis in the last weeks of the war to try and cover up their crimes. It's such an important experience to visit these places, but also quite an emotional one.
- Kate
Best Spinning Poles
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