On my 3rd day in Krakow, 10 of us from the hostel gathered our hangovers to our bosoms and headed off to Oswiecim, to visit the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps and pay our respects to the millions of people that had suffered there. It was a difficult day.
I hadn't given much thought to the trip beforehand, or to the impact it might have on me. My knowledge of the Nazis has been pretty much limited to primary school history lessons and Indiana Jones films, so my notions of what had happened there were vague, to say the least. Some of the other travelers I'd befriended on the trip had already visited, but nobody spoke at any length about it, other than to say that they'd been there. It's rare that backpackers maintain a dignified silence about anything, had I been more perceptive (and less hungover) this would have been a good indication of what was in store.
The touristy shite around the entrance is minimal, what's needed and no more. We had an hour before our tour was due to begin, so while most of the group opted for a sit down, Strawberry Shortcake and I took a stroll. We were in Auschwitz I (we were later to visit Auschwitz II, or Birkenau) where most of the original buildings have been preserved or restored, and many of them now house museums. Our guide, Anna, took us around some of them later. I found the one containing the loot stolen from prisoners almost physically shocking, and know now why it was the one image from our school textbook that had stayed with me. Seeing so many everyday objects amassed in vast floor-to-ceiling quantities was a very tangible illustration of the scale of the slaughter. Such personal effects too; worn shoes, prosthetic limbs; these are not people's things, they're more than that. But the hardest ones for me were the ones Anna didn't take us to. Individual countries have set up museums on site to remember their dead, and Strawberry and I visited two of these in the hour before the tour, "The Tragedy of the Jews of Slovakia" and "Czech Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp". The rest of the camp was on such a massive scale that I had genuine difficulty in getting my head around it, but it was in these two buildings that I got a real taste of the horror of what had happened there. Here there were biographies of the individual people who had been taken to Auschwitz, their life histories and cruel deaths documented in black and white. Photos of them with their children. Postcards they had written to their families, posted 3 weeks after their deaths under the pretence that all was well.
Harder for me again, there were pictures of the children. Beautiful, doe-eyed, gawky, jam-faced kids. There were drawings they had made during the short time they lived there, the poems they wrote. Few referred to their surroundings at all, their work is full of hope for a better life and sweet memories of the life they had before their incarceration. What happened to them beggars belief.
It was gratifying to see the respect that people paid to their surroundings while visiting the site. I've traveled some, and have come to expect the worst of tourists. Perhaps it's because the place itself is so physically arresting, perhaps it's the dignity of the staff. I personally found it disconcerting to see the camp on such a beautiful day. It gave the experience a very surreal feeling, that the visual impact of the camp was at such odds with its history and the emotional toll it takes. I was very grateful to have gone there with the group that I did and to have shared the experience, even though it was little spoken of afterwards. Sometimes it's enough just to have been there in one another's company.
I hadn't given much thought to the trip beforehand, or to the impact it might have on me. My knowledge of the Nazis has been pretty much limited to primary school history lessons and Indiana Jones films, so my notions of what had happened there were vague, to say the least. Some of the other travelers I'd befriended on the trip had already visited, but nobody spoke at any length about it, other than to say that they'd been there. It's rare that backpackers maintain a dignified silence about anything, had I been more perceptive (and less hungover) this would have been a good indication of what was in store.
The touristy shite around the entrance is minimal, what's needed and no more. We had an hour before our tour was due to begin, so while most of the group opted for a sit down, Strawberry Shortcake and I took a stroll. We were in Auschwitz I (we were later to visit Auschwitz II, or Birkenau) where most of the original buildings have been preserved or restored, and many of them now house museums. Our guide, Anna, took us around some of them later. I found the one containing the loot stolen from prisoners almost physically shocking, and know now why it was the one image from our school textbook that had stayed with me. Seeing so many everyday objects amassed in vast floor-to-ceiling quantities was a very tangible illustration of the scale of the slaughter. Such personal effects too; worn shoes, prosthetic limbs; these are not people's things, they're more than that. But the hardest ones for me were the ones Anna didn't take us to. Individual countries have set up museums on site to remember their dead, and Strawberry and I visited two of these in the hour before the tour, "The Tragedy of the Jews of Slovakia" and "Czech Prisoners in Auschwitz Concentration Camp". The rest of the camp was on such a massive scale that I had genuine difficulty in getting my head around it, but it was in these two buildings that I got a real taste of the horror of what had happened there. Here there were biographies of the individual people who had been taken to Auschwitz, their life histories and cruel deaths documented in black and white. Photos of them with their children. Postcards they had written to their families, posted 3 weeks after their deaths under the pretence that all was well.
Harder for me again, there were pictures of the children. Beautiful, doe-eyed, gawky, jam-faced kids. There were drawings they had made during the short time they lived there, the poems they wrote. Few referred to their surroundings at all, their work is full of hope for a better life and sweet memories of the life they had before their incarceration. What happened to them beggars belief.
It was gratifying to see the respect that people paid to their surroundings while visiting the site. I've traveled some, and have come to expect the worst of tourists. Perhaps it's because the place itself is so physically arresting, perhaps it's the dignity of the staff. I personally found it disconcerting to see the camp on such a beautiful day. It gave the experience a very surreal feeling, that the visual impact of the camp was at such odds with its history and the emotional toll it takes. I was very grateful to have gone there with the group that I did and to have shared the experience, even though it was little spoken of afterwards. Sometimes it's enough just to have been there in one another's company.
