On Friday, it was finally time to head to Krakow!! I got to the train station a few hours early and found a coffee shop to do a few assignments that I needed to complete before the weekend before the train came.
Surprisingly, my little knowledge of Russian has come in handy on more than one occasion this trip. I never considered myself to be able to communicate well in Russian because I never really was put in a situation where I had to speak it, but I definitely realized that I can when I have to. For example, when we got on the overnight train to Krakow, I was able to ask a man in Russian to switch sleeper cars with me so my friends and I could get our own room. It definitely made the ride more comfortable and we were actually able to get a decent night’s sleep.
After walking around the city in the morning, we got on the bus to get to Auschwitz, which was an hour and a half outside Krakow. When the bus pulled up, I was confused why we were stopping in what seemed to be a normal town. I was shocked- how could anyone live so close to the place where people so many people were killed? At the entrance to the camp, there was an gate that read “Arbeit Macht Frei,” which means “work sets you free.” As we continued making our way through, I found this to be a horrific mockery of what the prisoners endured in their time at Auschwitz.
Our tour began in a room that gave us a historical overview of the camp, along with pictures and shocking statistics of the types and numbers of people at Auschwitz. There I learned that once people would arrive to the camps in overcrowded train cars, an SS officer would decide whether they lived or died within seconds of looking at them, indicating their fate with a nod of his head. I was astounded to learn that 75-80% of people who arrived at the camp were sent immediately to gas chambers. If that wasn’t bad enough, they were told that they were going to “take a shower,” so once they undressed, they were trapped and poisoned with Hydrogen Cyanide. Then, they were stripped of their hair, jewelry, and their gold teeth were extracted.
As we got deeper into the camp, I couldn’t seem to grasp the magnitude of what had happened on the ground that I was walking on. The facts were in my face- rooms filled with piles on piles of human hair, piles of glasses, shoes, hairbrushes, suitcases stacked to the ceiling, but it still was still so awful that it didn’t feel real.
There was a building with walls covered in photos of the prisoners, where we learned about their day-to-day. They were forced to work 11 hours a day, being fed less than 1500 calories a day, and the jobs they had were awful. Some of these jobs included sorting through all the belongings of the people that were seized when they arrived to the camp, moving the corpses from the gas chamber to the crematorium, and digging trenches that quite literally graves.
The worst building was block 11, the death block. Here, prisoners would have their “trials,” which lasted minutes and always resulted in death. In the basement, there remnants of terrible ways that the prisoners were tortured. There were “standing cells,” where prisoners were forced to stand for days, and there was a “starvation cell,” which was a small room with a tiny hole to let light in. In the starvation cell, St. Maximillian Kolbe had died volunteering to take the place of a stranger, who ended up surviving the camp.
After, we went to Auschwitz II- Birkenau, about a mile or two away. It was so much larger and more spread out. We spent less time there, but we saw more sleeping bunkers and gas chambers (they were destroyed by the SS when word of liberation had reached the camp). By that time, the cold was also really starting to get miserable. I couldn’t imagine what it must’ve been like to have to endure winters in Poland. I felt guilty, to even think about being cold in my down jacket and warm scarf when all they had were pajamas.
As horrible as it was, I am a firm believe that what happened at Auschwitz should be talked about. If we don’t face history, it is bound to repeat itself.
When we got back to town, we headed to a burger place and balled out. Not only was it the best burger of my life, but it was also so incredibly cheap, as I found most things in Krakow to be. That night, I studied for my upcoming genetics test in the hostel and planned to wake up early to go on a walking tour of the city.
The next day, I accidentally spent too much time at the Polish mug store and missed my train to the airport. Because of this, I didn’t have time to check in my bag and security made me took away my face wash. It was very stressful and I was upset until I realized there are worse things in life than having to throw away my Neutrogena face wash.
I never expected to fall so hard for Krakow, of all places. I would love to learn more about Catholic history and go back to see the museums and the salt mine, as well as some of the gorgeous natural areas not far outside of town.
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