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I am a few days past due on the blog…so I am writing the Poland one and a Berlin one.
Visiting Auschwitz was something I am glad I did, but also did not enjoy walking through. The setting goes it was a time where it is off peak tourist time and it was a rainy day, making it a very fitting experience to see what it was like. I walked both the Auschwitz-Birkenau and main Auschwitz camps with mostly isolation from many other people because of the rain/off peak season. This made the experience especially in Birkenau scary. There was one building called the sauna, where they checked people in, took their clothes and good, shaved their heads, tattooed them, had them stand naked for hours to shower, then had them sit in a drying room in the cold for hours again until they were sent to the gas chamber or guided to the barracks. I walked through this building entirely alone… there was nobody else in it, and it creeped me out.
Birkenau was the best at showing the real life conditions of the camp, it was huge and built to kill. The design was totally build for sending most of the people off to the gas chambers. Today, it looks very much like what it use to look like and as you walk you can walk into the barracks and see the beds and holes for the toilets, and it was just horrible to see the living conditions.
Visiting this place makes things real for you on how real and how horrible it was. Reading about this and seeing it on movies is nothing like visiting these places. I cant really explain it, but you see how the system was designed to kill people and so efficiently, you find it hard to believe that humans can do that to one another. Then you think about the current levels of genocide in Sudan, Darfur, and the mass killings of people there. It just sucks to see this and think that people would want to do this.
The rest of my time in Krakow, was really fun on a lighter note. I went through the lovely old town square that was very much like Prauges, old town square, and it was very nice. The city of Krakow is beautiful. I went one day to an old communist cafeteria and had really good and cheap food it was fun to eat there not a drop of English I had to point to the plate I wanted to eat. The final day I went to the royal castle and explored more of the old town square, where I went to this really cool old bar underground and it was like a cool blues speakeasy. Then my host and I went to a really cool piano jazz club. So, good times after having a sad and scary time.
Nostrovia
Kevin
- comments
Mom How can you help but come home a very different person? As you move on you will carry those memories with you. I hope you visited an ancient church after Auschwitz to say a little prayer. (((Hugs)))! I love you.Stay Safe. Mom