A visit to Auschwitz

We woke up that morning to the remains of a night attack by bed bugs… our first experience on this journey, and were quickly shifted rooms while the hostel dealt with the problem… From there it was off to the bus station.

Knowing we were about to embark on an incredibly low day with a visit to the Auschwitz extermination camps, we boarded a bus and settled in for the two-hour journey to the area. We decided to get a guided tour, and watched the introduction movie beforehand. An old black and white harrowing introduction, the film was filled with real-life images from the liberation of the camps, and the frail and starving bodies of those that somehow made it through. We met our guide outside, who had been working there for ten years, dedicated to telling the story of what happened in the area she grew up in. We wandered the first camp and the smaller of the two, Auschwitz I with our guide, and were led through some of the most significant places, although she said you could spend a whole two days there and still not see everything.

I don’t really know how to describe it, so I won’t try, but it was an emotionally exhausting day, and haunting to see the real possessions that remained behind, and the confinement they were forced to endure. We moved on to Auschwitz II Birkenau where after an introduction to the site we were left to wander freely. Our guide said that being there in the heat of summer is a bit of a toned-down tour, as the place has far more impact in the winter when it's darker earlier and covered in snow. You get the sense of how cold and horrible the conditions were. The most horrifying thing about the second site was the sheer scale of the area, and we walked the grounds until the last bus returned to the original site. With one hour to spare before it was time to return we visited some of the exhibitions about particular countries, including the Netherlands, and the Hungarian exhibition, which you entered to the sound of a beating heart.

After seven hours out there, we boarded a bus back to Krakow and arrived back around 9pm. Our late dinner was spent at a brightly coloured Polish place, where vegetables lined the walls and costumed hosts served the meals. Josh and Andrew got a little carried away ordering sides for their meals of turkey and pork and ended up with way too much food to handle, and I tried the traditional Polish dumplings, filled with mushrooms and sauerkraut, which were quite tasty once I’d added a bit of chilli to them. It was then back to the hostel, and Andrew dashed out to buy some of the traditional Polish honey liqueur vodka, which we sipped away quietly at in the hostel. We invited Mary, the lovely girl working behind the hostel desk that night, to join us for a drink and sat up chatting about travels for a while before bed.