This post will be split in two parts. The first will be about Krakow and happy and the second will be about Auschwitz and quite sad.

I will not be posting pictures of Auschwitz as I personally believe it would be in poor taste and not appropriate to do so on social media. Those that want to see the pictures can either e-mail me directly, or wait until I get home and I can show you in person.

So that being said, Poland was not what I expected at all. When I thought of Poland as a destination I assumed it would be a drab, cold, grey place where no one smiled. I landed and was immediately taken aback. There was color everywhere, happy people, green landscapes and rolling hills. It was not what I envisioned in the slightest. I was extremely grateful that my previous assumptions were incorrect. Now granted, I did not do a lot of research on Poland (Krakow) as we were only going to be there for thirty or so hours. I broke my own rule about lack of understanding a place before I got there. Shame on me I suppose but maybe you don’t need to completely research places, as that may just ruin the surprise when you get there.

We had a fantastic meal at a restaurant about a block from the hotel. The equivalent of fifty dollars got us beers, cider, two appetizers and two mains. At home a similar meal at a similar restaurant would have been three to four times that much. This was the first indicator we had about the cost of things here, and it was looking like an inexpensive place to be. Again, quality of food versus cost was astounding. We liked it so much we went back the next day to try other things. Total food we had in two visits there: boar sausage, cold beet and hot rye soup, rabbit loin wrapped in bacon, ribs, pork knuckle, many beers and drinks. All of the food was great and I would recommend Straka (name of the place) to anyone going to Krakow.

Auschwitz, a one hour or so drive from Krakow. I know quite a bit about WWII history and what went on there however my primary reasons was to see what it felt like to walk the same paths that the prisoners did, to see the actual places that people were lined up in front of a German officer and separated from friends and family and either be put to work or sent to die. I could read about the things that happened and learn about them but to actually be there definitely threw me for a loop. The second we entered the main gate of the small camp, Auschwitz I, you could see it in some people’s faces, and I’m sure you could see it in mine as well. It was sadness. The part of this section of the tour that I lost it in was seeing two thousand kilograms of hair, sitting in a glass enclosure, that spanned an entire room. This was the hair of approximately seventy thousand women that entered Auschwitz but never got to leave. It was heartbreaking to see this as well as other rooms filled with confiscated shoes, thousands and thousands of shoes. Hundreds of suitcases and luggage, in another room, that they brought to these camps without realizing what was happening to them. They packed their lives away, one suitcase per person, and everything was ripped away from them. Approximately one and a half million people were murdered in Auschwitz before the end of the war and many children were sent to Germany for re-education and to become Germanized. Seeing the temporary gas chamber that was still standing there was tough to deal with as well. You could see what appeared to be finger nail marks in the walls where people were trying to claw their way out. They used a poison delivery system that could take up to twenty minutes to suffocate the people inside. It was genocide at it’s worst. Thinking about the panic and sheer terror that people must have gone through trying to survive an impossible situation is almost unbearable.

The second part of the tour was a short distance away at Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the three camps at Auschwitz. The others dwarfed in comparison. The concentration camp here was housing one hundred thousand prisoners at a time. This was the site that had multiple large gas chambers that the Nazis used to kill up to two thousand people at once, per chamber. They also had crematoriums situated close by to use as disposal methods. All of these buildings were destroyed when the camp was liberated. There is a monument there that serves as a reminder that we should not repeat the past and to let it be known that this was the location of one of the most tragic and unthinkable things to happen in human history. You can see rows upon rows of barracks that housed these prisoners. They were often made to work over ten hours a day in whatever weather was present, given two meals a day that served as perhaps one third of their needed intake and allowed to go to the bathroom only when instructed (they were counted down from thirty seconds, then removed from the latrine). This was brutal, daily life for these people. If they weren’t starved or worked to death, they were killed systematically by a group of people that viewed them as cattle, not people.

Even thinking about it while writing this nearly brings me to tears. I did end up feeling many emotions throughout the day. Anger, sadness, empathy and maybe even guilt. It was hard to differentiate between what I was feeling at times, because I didn’t always know what I was feeling. It was a lot to take in and caused a lot of emotions all at once. I still find myself having difficulty with processing everything I saw and felt, and likely will have trouble for a long time to come.

I think everyone should go here once in their lives, regardless of religion, historical background or racial heritage. It’s a tragic part of history that I think everyone needs to experience and witness and learn about.

Next up, five days in Prague and a bit of time to relax, maybe. Keep your eyes on the horizon!