Day 3: Auschwitz

It's standard in our public school curriculum to learn about the Holocaust in the 8th grade. I was 13 the first time I laid eyes on photographs of emaciated camp prisoners and piles upon piles of dead bodies. It was horrific. My 13-year-old self was incapable of understanding it all. The ghettos, the brutality, the camps, the starvation, the torture, the gas chambers... all because of one asshole's vision for a perfect race? My 30-year-old self is still incapable of understanding. And the fact that this all happened during a time my grandparents lived through blows my mind. (And without getting too political, I would like to say we've learned our lesson, but it appears that we haven't. Ghettos, starvation, torture and even genocides are still taking place all over the world.)
During my teenage years I would watch movies like Escape from Sobibor, Schindler's List, and Life Is Beautiful - these movies did a really amazing job of making it real for me. They brought to life, with motion and emotion, the kinds of things I had only read about in text books up until that point. They also always left me in a sobbing pile of tears even hours after the credits had rolled.

So with that - I never imagined I would be given the opportunity to actually visit the places where these horrific acts took place. But then I was. I'll admit that I was a little hesitant to go to Auschwitz. It just seemed to sad. To full of bad energy that I wasn't sure I wanted to partake in on my vacation. But we were going to be right there. We couldn't not go.

We meant to head out early in the morning but wound up sleeping in until about 10AM. We got dressed and headed down to the hotel restaurant for breakfast. I ordered my first of many cappuccinos and an "omelet with jam" - which wound up being a crepe. We asked our giggly front-desk gal how to get to the town of Oświęcim (which the Germans renamed Auschwitz). She kindly printed off a bus schedule and told us our next bus would leave at 1:15PM. So after walking down to a bus station and carefully inspecting about a dozen or so bus schedules and signs we finally found the right place. We waited in a park for an hour or so for our unmarked, white van to show up and take us to Auschwitz. For the equivalent of about $3 each we took the hour long ride to one of the most historically-relevant towns in the world.



Waiting in the park - brushing up on some Polish and admiring the excessive base to that statue.

The bus let us off in a park and the driver, in a very thick Polish accent, told us to walk about a mile South to the museum - formerly the camps. So we started walking through residential areas and down a road that made me feel like I was in the middle of nowhere. There were no signs but I trusted Jeremy's sense of direction until finally we reached a busy street and saw signage for "museum parking". When we walked up to the camp I was expecting something a solemn scene of tourists shedding quiet tears - but instead I was greeted with hundreds of loud, shitty, pimply-faced teenagers chugging soda and screaming and shoving and making out with each other. We checked our backpack, bought tickets for admission and found our way to the English speaking tour group.

We started at Auschwitz 1. This is the main camp. There were 16 cell blocks - I was surprised by how small the camp seemed. Each building had been converted into a museum of sorts. While the imagery and artifacts available were incredibly powerful, I was surprised by how stripped down the exhibits were - I suppose to manage the thousands of tourists going through the camp every day. Here's a sampling of what we saw at Auschwitz 1:



















After touring the main camp we took a bus down the street a bit to Auschwitz-Birkenau (also knowns as Auschwitz II). Coming up to the gate, which you might recognize from Schindler's List, was intense. The railroad tracks. The barracks. Auschwitz-Birkenau was much more "day in the life" and our tour guide detailed the struggles with simply going to the bathroom. It was intense.










As we were about to go deeper in to the camp thunder started rolling in and the sky became dark. Our tour guide recommended we head back - so we took a shuttle to Auschwitz I and grabbed our checked backpack. We quickly began our walk back to our bus stop (which was due to pick us up in about an hour and a half for the last trip back to Katowice for the day). I suggest we go around the camp on the opposite side we came in on. We walked by a huge crucifix and what I think used to be the house of one of the former Nazi generals. Right about then was when it started sprinkling. I dug a raincoat out of our backpack. And with that came the loudest clap lightning and thunder I've ever heard in my life along with a torrential downpour. Jeremy and I started running as fast as we could - with the camp and barbed wire to our left and a road with woods to our right. We ran for about 5 minutes straight and all I could think was how surreal it was that I was in the middle of a thunderstorm running from Auschwitz. We gave up and walked to the nearest bus stop for shelter.

As soon as the rain let up a bit we made a mad dash about 200 yards to our bus stop. 30 minutes later the rain completely stopped - we could only laugh about it as we emptied water out of our shoes and waited for our bus.







When we finally got back to our hotel we realized that we hadn't eaten since breakfast. So over a large greasy pizza and a couple of cold beers we decided where to go next: Vienna.