Poland

August 28, 2017
 The Copenhagen airport was so disorganized that they had everyone from the Kraków flight at a Zurich gate, and the gate representatives said they no idea where to find our flight. It was late coming in and a mad dash to find the correct gate. Even though our flight was late, we still landed in Kraków on time. A gorgeous young man that should be a model was there to pick us up. Welcome to Poland!
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August 29, 2017        
The same thing has happened two nights in a row where I wake up at 2 am and am wide awake for two hours. Consequently, we have overslept both those days and it has been a mad scramble to get where we were going. In less than 45 minutes, we took showers, ate breakfast and changed rooms (due to the extremely loud trains that ran most of the night right below our window).
              But we did make it to our 10am Jewish quarter walking tour. Here are some highlights:

Synagogues were required by law to be smaller than Catholic churches (we eventually found out that this was the case in every country we visited).

There were 68,000 Jews in Kraków at the start of WW2. Only 3000 survived and most left afterwards. (In fact, almost half of those that survived were Schindler Jews.) It is a very small community now, but starting to get larger.

Schindler’s Square (different from main square) is where they filmed the scene in the movie of the ghetto being liquidated and the woman trying to hide her daughter under the stairs. The area was originally run down and neglected up until the filming up the movie in the mid-nineties, but afterwards tourists starting flocking to the Square because of the movie.

The chairs in the Ghetto Heroes Square are commemorating the lives lost after the ghetto was liquidated in 1943. Each of the 65 chairs represents a thousand people. There was only one non-Jewish person living in the Kraków ghetto, and he stayed to operate the pharmacy. He later wrote in his diary that what struck him the most after the liquidation were the abandoned chairs and the eerie silence. His diary entry was the inspiration for the memorial.

There is only a small part of the original ghetto wall that is still standing. No one knows if it was made in the shape of gravestones on purpose or not.

We saw other things on the tour besides the Jewish Quarter and so I've included some of those pictures.

After the tour, we had lunch at a wonderful little outdoor restaurant right next to our hotel. Robin had pierogis and I had gnocchi. Excellent!

We then caught our shuttle to get to the Wieliczka Salt Mines. It's a 30-minute drive east of the city. We were the only 2 people that joined a much larger tour of people coming from Auschwitz. (I CAN'T imagine doing both in one day!!) The tour guide led us down 380 steps doing about 8 at a time before reaching a landing, turning, and then another 8 steps. It was nearly 60 flights of stairs at a fairly quick speed. I was dizzy almost immediately and had to focus on the wall in front of me rather than looking down. The mine is very old, built in the 1600s. It is the largest salt mine in the world.

We walked about 1.5 miles total on the whole tour and we saw exactly 1% of the entire mine. There were hundreds and hundreds of corridors. We were about 425 feet down; it was also 10-15 degrees cooler than outside.

The large chandelier room was fantastic, and like every other room was made entirely of salt.

The miners certainly loved their chapels, with religious icons on every wall. Even the pope visited at some point.

But we didn't LOVE this tour at all. It was very long and was the same thing over and over. Maybe we aren't that interested in mining and salt. Our guide was quite stern, and her severe outfit made her look like a prison guard. I'm still glad we did it. But if one thing had to be eliminated this would have been it.

That night we went to Old Town. Beautiful architecture, cobblestone streets and great photos with fantastic late afternoon lighting. Horse drawn carriages clip-clopping by. Tons and tons of people, many in their 20s (supposedly there are 60k college students in Kraków). The square is the largest in Europe, it reminded me a lot of Jemaa el -Fnaa in Marrakech.

August 30, 2017

A very long day. Got up at 5 am for 6 am pick up and 90 minute drive to Auschwitz.

On the way there, we watched a movie from 1945 about the actual liberation of the camp. The movie really detailed the tortures the prisoners endured, complete with horrific photos of their wounds and deformities. I was practically in tears by the time we reached the camp. After the movie was done, the radio on the bus automatically came on and, ironically, Pharrell Williams was loudly singing "Happy".

So my thoughts on Auschwitz... The size is the first thing you notice. It's absolutely huge. Also, every picture that we see of Auschwitz during the war is in black and white, plus it's usually muddy and grey. This day, however, was beautiful and sunny. It's hard to look at the manicured lawns and well-maintained brick buildings and imagine the suffering and the anguish that happened here.

1.1 to 1.4 million people died (most records were lost so no one knows exact count), 90% of them were Jewish.

We saw prison barracks where many people were crammed in each bunk.

It's really sad that these people brought their dishes and thought they would be using them. Other enclosures were filled with only shoes or hairbrushes.

Another glass enclosure was filled with suitcases with their names on it (a horrible trick the Nazis played by telling them to write their names down so they could find their belongings after they had a “shower”). The most horrific room of all consisted of 15,000 pounds of human hair, with long braids still completely intact. Honestly, I felt sickened that all that hair was once attached to a real live human being.

A medical experimentation room.

One of the shooting walls the Nazis used

The smokestack of the only still-standing gas chamber and crematorium. We were not allowed to take pictures in two locations - the room with the hair and then walking through this gas chamber/crematorium. That is why that idiot senator from Louisiana recently caught such hell for videotaping and narrating while walking through the gas chamber. Not only are cameras not allowed, silence is also required. I don't know why anyone would even WANT to talk while walking through there... knowing that several hundred thousand people lost their life in that exact room. I could literally feel the heavy weight of what happened and could be nothing other than quiet and respectful for the people who died there. We also saw "death by starvation" cells, where they placed people in cells (literally holes) and never gave them any food until they died. What actually struck me the most about being at Auschwitz was not the unimaginable suffering (I think I knew that already), but the malicious, sadistic CRUELTY. How is it that SO MANY people agreed to be this evil all at the same time? I know there is such a thing as pack mentality, but the size and scope of the ruthlessness is staggering.

After finishing with Auschwitz I, we had lunch. From there we went to Auschwitz 2/Birkenau. This camp is twenty times larger than the first one. Towards the end of its existence, it was under construction to hold one hundred thousand people. It was originally used to house Soviet POW's, but changed exclusively to an extermination camp. The trains pulled into the camp by crossing under the large building; that entrance was called the "Gate of Death".

One of the saddest things our guide told us (how can one even begin to know where stories are ranked on the "sad scale"?) was that the Sonderkommando (the Jews that were forced to work for the Nazis) would lie to people on the incoming trains about what was really happening in the camp. They did this to save lives. They would tell the healthier mothers to give their crying babies to the grandparents and older people to hold onto "just for the moment". This would save the life of the mother, because the babies and grandparents were immediately exterminated. The Sonderkommando knew if they told the mothers the babies were going to die right away, they wouldn't give them up and two lives would be lost. I was in tears hearing this.

Many of the barracks were destroyed except for the chimneys

A women's bathroom sink

Toilets

It took 14 minutes to kill a person with the gas but more than 24 hours to cremate them. So the Nazis built more crematories so they could keep up with the bodies. The tons and tons of ashes were then transported by trucks and dumped in the Vistula river. Towards the end of the war and as the Soviet army was closing in, the Nazis attempted to destroy all the crematoriums at Birkenau to try to hide their murderous genocide.

Our guide was a man named Gregory. I noticed how reverent and respectful he was during the 3-4 hour tour. At first, I wondered if it was genuine. It would take a special kind of person to do this day in and day out, while not becoming desensitized to it and also knowing that people in your group may have lost family members at Auschwitz. By the end of the tour I realized it was totally genuine and I really admired him for that. At the end of the tour, our group had a discussion about the genocides that have happened since the horrors of the Holocaust... Rwanda, Bosnia, etc. My one huge takeaway from all of this was how could ANYONE want to be a Nazi? In current times, it seems we are doomed to repeat history because we obviously haven't learned it.

​After being dropped off at our hotel and recharging our phones (HUGE mistake not to bring backup battery pack as well as an ATM card!!), we decided to walk through Old Town and then up to Wawel Castle. We didn't pay to go inside the castle but just walked the grounds instead. The castle has a beautiful view of the Vistula River. We walked from there through Kazimierz (the Jewish area) looking for somewhere to eat.

We ended up finding a place for dinner that was close to the Oscar Schindler museum called Zielonym. I told Robin we should branch out and have something other than cheap pizza. So we ended up with a cauliflower burger with chickpea fries, and pork loin with vegetable goulash and polenta. The total with tip? $27! Poland is super cheap right now, that's why people are flocking to Kraków.

The Oscar Schindler museum was more about life in Kraków from 1935-1945 than it was about Oscar Schindler. I think they were trying to set the context of the times. Anyway, none of the factory is left... just the building itself. It's a good exhibit, but if it's busy everyone is crowding around trying to read the small print at each display. Thankfully we went at 7 pm and it wasn't so bad, but still busier than I thought it would be at that time.

I realized halfway through that the floor was done in Nazi swastikas.

I had forgotten (from the movie) that his factory originally made pots and pans, then later shells and artillery for the Nazis.

Only one room was devoted to the Schindler Jews, but packed with information. The museum had recorded the Schindler Jews experiences of the war and Oscar Schindler (most are now deceased). We spent a long time listening to the recordings.

I can officially now say that I have fair amount of knowledge about Poland and the events leading up to World War II, as well as the Holocaust. I'm sure it's not even close to my expert brother on WW2 history, but probably more than most.

Robin's walking app says we walked 9.3 miles today...my feet certainly feel like it. Off to Lithuania tomorrow, thank You for my wonderful life!