Well, let's start off by saying that although it is considered the jewel in Poland's crown, and the place to go if you are a tourist in Poland, it doesn't hold a candle to Warszawa.
That said, here are some pictures from our free walking tour of Krakow:
Paweł, our guide, pronounced "Pavo", a native Pole;
The clock tower in the main square where a guy plays the famous bugle song every hour on the hour;
The Barbican, a fortress at what was once the gate to enter the city;
A weird statue of a head that Paweł crawled inside of;
A guy dressed up as a beer handing out "Free Pivo!" coupons; and
The church on Wawel Castle.
There were definitely some interesting sights to see (like the Wawel dragon, which actually shoots fire!) and lots of eating a drinking too be done in the Jewish Quarter where we stayed, but as it is more of an international city than a strictly Polish city, it didn't win my heart. Not like Warszawa did.....
We booked an overnight train to Prague, so we had most of our last day available to explore. We ended up hopping on a bus and taking a tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau... I'm sure you've all heard the name. Auschwitz was the largest concentration camp during the Holocaust.
Auschwitz is located about an hour away from Krakow. During the tour, we walked around the barracks and the kitchens and the imprisonment cells and on the gorgeous, sunny, hot day, it didn't seem so bad. Just like summer camp, really.... Until you realize just how many people were crammed into the area. Until you realize just what went on in this place.
After touring the barracks and trying to imagine having to share those tiny beds with three other people, sharing a room meant to two hundred with a thousand other people, we went into some rooms full of items that had been collected during the war: thousands of shoes, thousands of eyeglasses, thousands of cooking utensils.... The sheer volume of it all was sickening.
But the whole experience for us was mostly very cold, and very sterile.
Like the Stalin quote I mentioned in my post about the Holocaust memorial in Berlin: "The loss of [so many] lives is just a statistic."
It is quite literally incomprehensible.
I thought that our visit to Auschwitz would be more... I don't know. Heart-wrenching? Emotional? But it wasn't. It was just facts, with no real attempt at pulling on anyone's heartstrings. When we went to the Holocaust memorial exhibits in Berlin, it was a much more personal approach. Reading a letter than a wife wrote to her husband in her last few days or maybe even moments was much more effective at getting me to feel something than standing in a gas chamber at Auschwitz, which should have better shown the magnitude of what happened. Our visit to Auschwitz focused on numbers and repeated things we've all read in our history books, but it was hard to connect with on a personal level.
There were moments. I had a fleeting moment of panic when I saw a picture of Jews being separated, males on one side, females on the other, upon their arrival to Auschwitz, because that picture made me wonder what such an experience would have done to me, to be separated from the man I love and never knowing whether or not he was still alive. It made my skin crawl a bit to see the massive pile of women's hair that had been shorn off and set aside upon their arrival to Auschwitz. But there were so few moments like that, and there should have been so many. It seemed like such a tourist trap, rather than a step back in history. Which is sad. So thank goodness there are many more Holocaust memorials and museums all over the world which better appeal to the human heart. Steve mentioned to me that at the Holocaust Museum in Los Angeles, there are Holocaust survivors there to tell you about their experiences in the concentration camps. People who were only children at the time, who were separated from their families, who didn't know what it was that they'd done to deserve such treatment, who never really healed from that experience, even after all these years. You can't avoid a story like that, not when it is being told to you face to face. But you can pretend a concentration camp is just a summer lodge if the day is nice and the guide is so comically over-dramatic that you can't stand to listen to anything he says.
By the end of the day I felt so guilty for not feeling anything while I was there. I know what happened. I've felt horrified, and sad, and sickened by the things I've learned about the Holocaust since I've been in Europe. But not at Auschwitz. Not on a tour, not when the idea of having to feel something is more or less forced on me with no real attempt at actually making me feel something. It is an educational, interesting eperience to walk around within the camp, but not much more than that, I'm afraid. You will learn more about the tragedy that struck in WWII elsewhere.
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