Chelsea, me, and Anabel in front of a wall of paintings
Getting ready to enjoy some traditional Polish food!
The next morning, our entire group met with Marcel, who doubled as our professor and tour guide of Krakow for the day. We participated in a walking tour of the “Old Town” part of Krakow, which is the historical, older part of the city. The tour consisted of exploring the huge square and walking to the castle and castle's church.
With Melinda in the Old Town Square
Inside the town square church
With Leah and Christine in the church
Experiencing local culture!
Krakow castle
At the Krakow castle
Once the tour ended, Anabel and I decided to walk to the Jewish district of Krakow. This part of the city was also very charming, and we ate dinner here, which also happened to include a “lost in translation” moment. Anabel decided to order one of the restaurant's “salads” with her meal, envisioning a bowl of lettuce and lots of vegetables. When she asked the waitress what kind of salads they had, she said they had carrot, cabbage, and cucumber. A bit disappointed in the lack of lettuce and variation of vegetables, Anabel decided to go with the cucumber (cucumber salad is very, very traditional in Eastern Europe). A few minutes later, the waitress brings Anabel a plate full of about 10 sliced pickles. So, our vision of a salad went from one full of lettuce and vegetables, to cucumbers, to pickles.
After dinner, we headed over to a Jewish history and culture museum. There was a group of people learning Jewish folk dance, so we watched them as we began to tour the museum. The museum consisted of sections focusing on Jewish life before WWII, during WII, and post WWII. I was touched by many of the images in the museum, and felt like it prepared me for our trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau the next day. After the tour, I purchased two books from the expansive book store in the museum. The first is a compilation of works by various recognized post-Holocaust writers who had been imprisoned in concentration camps, and the second is the memoir of a young, Catholic, Polish woman who becomes a Holocaust rescuer and resistance fighter against the Germans and Soviets during WWII.
The next day, our group had to wake up very early in order to make our 10am tour of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Our bus was stopped on the highway by Polish police, who did a "random" check of our passports. Because this delay was so long, we missed our scheduled tour time at Auschwitz, and ended up taking a tour at 11am. The tour was 3.5 hours long, consisted of a walk-through of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Auschwitz I was the smaller, "test run" camp mostly used for forced labor and for keeping prisoners of war. We saw many of the torture chambers, execution spots, pictures taken of the camp during WWII, and numerous displays of the personal articles of people who entered the camp.
There were many parts from the tour of the first camp that really affected me:
The first was a glass display that consisted of 2 tons of human hair. The Nazis had collected the hair after shaving it off people's heads in order to sell it (apparently it was very valuable). When the Soviets liberated the camp, they found over 7 tons of human hair.
Our tour guide later told us a story, before we went into the building with the torture cells. The Nazis had numerous ways of torturing people to death, and there was a torture room for almost every form of torture: a starvation room, a suffocation room (that had no window and in which there were usually four or five people at a time), a standing room, and so on. When someone attempted to escape or did escape from the camp, the Nazis would kill ten random people from the camp to show to the rest of the prisoners the consequences of running away, and to deter prisoners from doing so. One time, a man escaped, and the Nazis chose 10 people to kill. One of the men in the group was frantically begging the guards not to kill him, because he had a wife and large family that he needed to live for. There was a Catholic priest standing nearby and heard what the man was saying to the guards. Moved by what the begging man was saying, the priest told the guards he would willingly take the place of the man. The Nazi guards agreed to this exchange, and put the priest in the starvation cell instead. Two weeks later, when the guards went to retrieve the priest's body from the cell, they found him still alive. Although the guards shot him after they found him alive, the story of the priest lives on because the man who's place the priest took survived the Holocaust. And so did his entire family.
During the tour, there were many various pictures displayed on the walls inside some of the buildings. Our tour guide pointed to one of the pictures, which showed two SS officers directing a line of Jewish people into the camp. One of the officers was pointing people either left or right-choosing whether they would live and work or die in the gas chambers, while the other was assisting him in keeping order. Our guide said that a few months ago, a man came on a tour of Auschwitz and recognized the SS officer keeping order as his father. After a few hours, the researchers were able to confirm this. The man had never known that his father was a supporter of the Nazi regime, yet alone a SS officer in a concentration camp.
Though there were many difficult and heart-breaking parts of the first tour, the most traumatic part was walking through one of the gas chambers. Knowing that so many people had suffered in these infamous chambers, and then standing in the place where they had stood before being killed is something that shakes you to your core.
In high school, I had to read Victor Frankl's book, A Man's Search for Meaning for my Morality class. Frankl says that the reason the concentration camps were so successful in killing Jews and other minorities was because of the absence of human empathy that the officers and capos in the camps were able to develop. After walking through the first camp, I could see how the officers could become so detached from the people they were killing: they only had to drop the poison gas down chimneys, underground to where thousands of people were waiting to take showers, and never even hear the screams of the dying.
After visiting the first camp, we took the bus to the second camp, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a few miles away. This camp was the larger concentration and death camp, at least four times larger than Auschwitz I.
Our tour guide told us a powerful story here as well, which I had read about the previous day at the Jewish history and culture museum in Krakow. Six Jewish women forced to work in one of the ammunition factories worked with six capos on a plan to blow up and burn down most or all of the camp, but particularly the gas chambers and crematoriums that existed in the camp. For a long time, the women smuggled gun powder under their fingernails into the camp. When they had collected enough gun powder, they worked with several other capos (who worked in the crematoriums) to explode parts of the camp. They succeeded in destroying a crematorium and a gas chamber. Eventually, everyone involved was executed, but the result of their resistance actions can still be seen at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, as the Nazis never had time to re-build these awful structures before the Soviet invasion and "liberation" of Poland.
This experience was one of the most moving I have ever felt. It is a testament to the results of human racism, ambition, and loss of empathy that will forever haunt mankind. At the end of our tour, our guide added that the world has seen many other genocides since WWII, and that in almost all of those cases, the rest of the world failed to act, again and again.
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