Krakow

On Thursday evening I took the night train to Krakow, Poland. Krakow has a very long, rich history involving religious strife, war, communism, hardship, all culminating to make a truly amazing city. I don't like Poland as much as I LOVE Budapest. However, it has been a great experience being here.

The night train is really comfortable, provided you get a sleeper car. We had the foresight to pay a bit extra for this amenity and slept many of the hours of the journey away. It is about 10.5 hours via train to Krakow. However, it's fairly inexpensive, and as long as you get to sleep en route, it's a great deal for me. The only hitch in the ordeal was the boarder crossings. I was in a berth with two other girls, happily sleeping in our layered bunks. Someone knocked viciously at the door, and assuming it was our other friends in the berth several doors down, we yelled mildly obscene things regarding their inability to let us sleep in peace. When the knocking didn't desist, and instead became steadily louder, we grumpily flung the door open. Imagine our surprise when in marched several European men in fur hats demanding for our passports! I suppose we should have forseen this mild difficulty, but somehow we didn't think about the fact that we would be passing through Slovakia to get to Poland. Therefore, without this foresight, we were not in an appropriate state of dress for male visitors, and thus followed a series of very awkward encounters, made even more nerve-wracking by the language barrier. To add to the trouble, my sleepy friend tried to be friendly and inquired if we were in Slovenia, which is apparently a far different place than Slovakia and tested the patience of the boarder patrols.

We found our hostel with little difficulty with the help of a cab. Being that we live in Hungary, we're very profficient at sign language and we know to write down words that we'll need and point to them, rather than try to pronounce them. The hostel is called "The Stranger Hostel" and is spectacular. It's sort of like summer camp. Everyone is our age, traveling the world just for the heck of it. The facility was really clean and homey; I would return in a heartbeat. I'm actually currently at the hostel using one of the computers they have available for our use. It's pretty cool.

The first day we were here, we literally explored. We knew nothing of Poland, so we set off into "Old Town" and promptly discovered a fabulous open air market. Everything here is dirt cheap and fantastic. I had a blast shopping and comparing the different stalls. In our explorations, we found or way into a Polish restaurant where I had what seemed to be some sort of potato dumplings in cheese. We explored the castle, which was really cool because it was so old. In fact, that's the neat thing about this entire city. One day we took a guided tour of the city, and when we passed a Synagogue, they said, "the is the newest synagogue, built in the early 19th century." In America, our OLDEST buildings were built around that time. On this guided tour we got to see the Jewish Ghetto and Oskar Schindler's factory. This was really moving at the time, but nothing could prepare me for what I saw today.

We went on a guided tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau, the two most famous concentration camps where over 1.5 million people were murdered. These camps are located about an hour and a half outside of Krakow, and so our hostel arranged a tour for us that included transportation. We started at Auschwitz, which was the original death camp, and the first to employ the use of Cyclone-B, the gas the Nazis sprayed into the gas chambers where all those "unfit for labor" were sent. Those who couldn't handle such work included the elderly, the sick, the crippled, children, and pregnant women. Auschwitz was set up as a bit of a museum, with exhibits in the original barracks. It was astounding. In one of the barracks, there was a display of items confiscated from Jewish prisoners, or taken from the bodies of those put to death. Most of such items were sent to Germany to be sold, and that which remained in the camps, waiting to be shipped, was burned to hide the evidence of the nazi horrors. What remained for us to see was only a tiny fraction of the belongings of prisoners. There were huge rooms stacked with these belongings. There were thousands of toothbrushes, combs, pots and pans, prosthetic limbs, shoes, and eye glasses. There was also a room full of the hair shorn from women. This hair was used to make the blankets given to the Jewish prisoners. Like the rest of the items, the hair was stacked to the ceiling. It gave a horrifying idea of the number of people who died, and suddenly turned anonomous victims into real humans. We were also taken into the one remaining gas chamber and furnace. It was the original chamber made by the nazis. I don't think it takes explaining what that experience was like. We then went to Birkenau, which was made by Auschwitz prisoners because Auschwitz was becoming too small. As far as the eye could see, wooden, uninsulated barrocks lay across the land, or ruins of chimneys standing where barrocks used to be. In the center of this expanse was a rail road where prisoners were unloaded. We stood in the exact place that the Nazi "doctor" stood to make the decision whether each prisoner lived or died.

This was just earlier today that I experienced this, so hopefully I will be able to write another blog more eloquently describing certains horrors and emotions I felt. I wrote an e-mail home, however, and noted that I have an entirely different perspective on history in general, especially the holocaust.

On a happier note, we also toured the church St. Mary's, ate a lot of Polish food, fed really tame pigeons from our hands, experienced the Polish night life, and took loooooots of pictures. As soon as I get back to my computer, I will put these pictures on my picture website. I'm going to make a new album, so therefore these new pictures will not show up on the reel near the top of my blog. You'll have to go to the link on the right side of the page. It will take you directly to the site.

I hope all is well, and I can assure everyone that there is waaaaay too much acordian music in Poland.