Today began with another early morning and then a LOT of travelling. We all piled into our mini busses at 8am and didn’t reach our destination until 2.30pm. I don’t have an awful lot to say about the bus trip. We stopped at the border of the Czech Republic and Poland to do the required hopping back and forth between countries, we changed our Korunas into Zlotys and we stopped for lunch at a very yummy restaurant where a mistake with my order meant I had to wait a good twenty minutes and watch everyone else eat. Most of the journey though was just watching fields roll by, coupled with complete failure to sleep.
At 2.30pm we pulled into Auschwitz. My first impression was a confusing one – the sun was shining strongly and the place was crawling with tour busses. It just seemed somewhat inappropriate. We had a tour guide for around three hours and it was pretty full on (no surprises there). Particular things that stood out for me were walking into the room with the real hair of 50,000 women and seeing the 40,000 pairs of shoes that accounted for only 5% of those collected at the camp. I also was quite affected by the rows of photos of prisoners and the dates beneath them… a lot of them died only a few days after the photos were taken. And then of course, there was walking into a gas chamber. The massive scale of things really hits you hard.
We spent about an hour and a half in Auschwitz I and then headed over to Auschwitz-Birkenau. This was a completely different experience – we were in awe at the size of it, around 200 football fields. At this point that sun was pretty unforgiving and the suggestion of walking a mile across the camp to the crematorium ruins knocked out half of our group. We were left our card playing group (that Dan has named ‘team hardcore’) and off we trudged. This again was extremely interesting and extremely awful at the same time. We walked through a couple of barracks, a couple of toilet blocks and saw the ruins of more gas chambers– our guide was very interesting and told us a lot about his own Great Uncle who was in the camp, plus conversations he’s had with survivors.
Soon we were all back in the bus, having discussions about the way history is portrayed and the big question of whether something so hideously awful could ever happen again. In under an hour, we arrived in Krakow, settled into our swanky giant hotel room and headed out on a orientation walk. I didn’t really know much about this city at all, excepting what I knew through Schindler’s List. I didn’t expect it to be as pretty and quaint as it is. The old town has the largest market square in Europe and is surrounded by old fortress walls and gardens. And of course, there is a lot of history here too.
After our orientation walk we headed to a really quite amazing underground restaurant with Bohemian decorations and an old white haired man in tails playing the piano (including Singin in the Rain, Hello Dolly and My Fair Lady… I gave him a big tip!). Dinner for me was three different types of fried Pierogi, on a plate made out of bread. It was yummy but rather epic. Four of us girls also consumed two bottles of Chilean wine with dinner, which was also very much enjoyed.
It turned out that those bottles of wine were the start of a rather drunken evening – after dinner at 10pm we hit the local supermarket to stash up on chocolate and two more bottles of wine. It was only about an hour and half later that we made a quick dash back to pick up another two bottles, which pretty much gives a good indication of what kind of night it was. Six of us squished into Sarah and Dan’s bedroom, the cards came out… we also played many games of ‘Celebrity’, a game which I was taught on my last tour in Asia – basically a random mix of Taboo and Charades. It wasn’t until 3am that we made our way back to our own beds, after a very enjoyable night indeed.
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