Expectations and Experience, part two

We took the inter-city train to Crakow. While we were waiting on the platform we were entertaining ourselves by using our electronic translator to look up words printed on the ticket. “peron” = platform, etc. An older woman watched us for a while, and then came over and took our ticket & started to explain it to us in Polish. We actually knew we were on the right platform at the right time (for once) but there was no way to tell her that. After a while she went over and found a student who spoke English and he came and explained our ticket to us. More friendly folks. It was a very slick modern train which went up to 165 km an hour! That was a change from the Russian rail service, let me tell you! There was no clickty-clack on the track either, just a woosh…and here we are.

In Crakow I booked a hostel that was more like a hotel with shared kitchen, so we had a TV in our room. Another place where expectation crossed with reality - the Polish TV series we watched (in Polish, but it’s not all that complicated to follow the plot) was set in WW2 Warsaw.
Crakow was occupied by the Germans but was not bombed, so it’s “as it was” in the olden days. We were told that it’s the cultural capital of the country. We spent five nights there, so we were able to relax and enjoy the city. Our hostel was just a couple of hundred meters outside the walls of the old town, and we spent most of our time wandering around there. Our first adventure was a bike tour of the area, including the old town, I described that experience in my birthday post.

The tour of Auschwitz-Birkenow -- we felt we could not be here without going there, it’s a part of our history and our heritage. A person cannot enter without a guide, and there are so many people there with guides that it’s like being in one of the major museums or art galleries of the world - groups of people with headsets huddled around, listening on their channel in their language. And it is like a major museum or art gallery in some ways.

The brick buildings and barracks of Auschwitz itself actually look quite cozy - of course now there is grass growing between them, and interiors are un-crowded and clean. The guides emphasized the fact that it was the Germans, not the Polish, who built the camps, and the Polish intellectual and military elite were the first victims of the camps. It was interesting to learn the history of the camp, how it progressed from a work-camp to a death-camp, and Hitler’s changing focus on who should be eliminated, and how. We saw all the things that you have probably seen in pictures - the piles of human hair, suitcases, shoes, personal belongings taken from victims. All these are behind glass, very effectively arranged in display cases, and I found it hard to grasp a sense of reality from the displays. It was still like looking at pictures or museum displays.

We went into the first gas chamber, which is preserved at Aushwitz, though most of the killing took place at nearby Birkenow. It is actually outside the main camp, in the administration area. Just across the road, on the other side of the wall, is the camp commanders house. He lived there with his wife and 5 children and apparently they considered it “just another military posting” and had quite a happy life in the countryside. After the war he was brought back, tried and condemned by the Polish government. He hung on a gallows located half way between his family home and the gas chamber. It was in considering the horrible contrast between what went on inside the camp and outside that I began to feel the impact of history in a personal way.

We also visited the huge Birkenow camp, which is where the train-loads of Jewish families were brought and it still looks like all the movies we have seen. There are a few brick barracks (constructed of bricks from the buildings of the nearby villages that were evacuated and demolished by the Germans so that the camps would be in a “no mans land”). Most of them are wooden, and they stretch as far as the eye can see in every direction. Not all have been re-built, but we could see the foundations across the field and the outer walls in the distance. It is easy to imagine the terrible living conditions, the confusion and the fear.

When we left I bought Eli Wiesel’s book “Night” which tells of his experience there. I recommend it if you want to know more. I think that the only way to know the story is to listen to the people who were there.