April 6, 2009

Today we visited Auschwitz. The representative of the company through which we booked the tour picked us up around 9 along with four other people. It took a little over an hour to get to Auschwitz. Once there, we watched a film about the concentration camp before entering Auschwitz. It was a different type of experience, walking through the once Polish army barracks turned Nazi concentration camp. We spent about two hours in the first camp, looking at various exhibitions set up in the old barracks. One exhibition housed all the items taken from the prisoners when they entered the camp. There was a room just filled with shoes; another with toothbrushes, hairbrushes, shaving brushes, and shoe brushes. Another room had all the women’s hair that was taken during the war. The hair was sent to German textile factories and was to be used as stiffening in fabric. We then visited the Death Block, number 11, where the nearby Death Wall is situated outside in the courtyard area. The whole overall experience was one that I will never forget.

After a 15 minute break, we drove to the nearby Birkenau camp, the second of the Auschwitz camps, the death camp. This is the camp with the infamous wall with the train tracks running through the gate. We only spent about an hour here but it was enough. We visited the ruins of gas chambers and crematoriums, more barracks that housed the prisoners, and the barracks that had the toilets and wash-basins that were too few for the number of prisoners in the camp. It was awful to see all of this; awful to think that people were evil enough to think of such an organized way to destroy millions of lives. I’m glad we went to visit the camp, it brought home the momentous damaged caused by one crazy, evil man.

After returning back to Krakow, we found a place to eat out for dinner. We had some great food, potato soup and pierogi. After dinner we returned to our apartments and went to bed after staying up late and talking.