Poland

I'm not going to spend much time on Warsaw. My hostel was pretty average, located in a residential area miles from anything useful. There's no incentive to put hostels in a good area in Warsaw, I think, because there isn't a heap of tourism. Apparently Warsaw does have an old town, but I never saw it. I just took like an hour-long walk out to the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising memorial. On the first night I went out to a club, which was actually really fun. The second night I just hung around the hostel drinking and chatting with a couple of American guys called Warner and Paul, who were coincidentally both travelling to Krakow on the same day as me, and staying in the same hostel there.

Krakow is entirely different to Warsaw. It's one of my favourite places on the trip so far. It's extremely touristy, but not ruined by tourists. The first thing I saw on arriving at Krakow was this:



It's a huge board that shows exactly what rooms are and aren't available in hotels all over the city. Pretty cool. After we made it to our hostel, which is brilliantly located in the heart of the old town, we headed out at night to check out the town, and were confronted with a massive open-air concert, complete with orchestra and choir, in the middle of the Old Town Square:




Apparently it was because it's 750 years since Krakow became a city. Who knew?

Krakow is an extremely pretty town. Here's some random shots I've taken since I've been here:









That last is my hostel's street. If you zoom in on the middle you might be able to see a little green/yellow/red striped sign; that's my hostel.

After seeing the open-air concert, I checked my mail. You might remember two English girls, Katherine and Lindsey, that I met in Paris. In a huge piece of randomness, I had an email from Katherine telling me that they'd just arrived in Krakow! I replied asking if they wanted to meet, and we arranged to meet up the next day. I met them the next afternoon and we checked out the royal castle and cathedral. We organised to do something called the "Booze Cruise" that night. It was supposed to be a three hour cruise down the river, with unlimited alcohol and a BBQ included. However when I headed down there that night, there was nothing going on. I somehow missed the girls, but it was the same deal for them. So after some email back-and-forth, myself, Paul and Warner all headed to their hostel just out of old town and drank at the bar there.

The following day I signed up for the afternoon tour of Auschwitz. Auschwitz is the German translation of the name of the Polish village it is located in, Oświęcim. It's actually three camps. The first, Auschwitz I, was a typical concentration camp. The second, Auschwitz II-Birkenau, was the largest Nazi camp and was the famous extermination camp. The third was a camp built closer to a work site so that weak prisoners from Birkenau would not have to hike a long distance before work. The Auschwitz museum is located at Auschwitz I. Only original buildings are preserved at Birkenau - there are no exhibits.

This is Auschwitz I:




The museum was quite confronting. After being gassed, victims would be stripped of personal belongings and had their hair shaved. Valuable belongings would be shipped back to Germany and the rest destroyed. Even their hair was shipped back, and (here's something I didn't know) textiles were made from it, for use in uniforms and so on. They had examples of the cloth there. When the camp was liberated, piles of personal belongings and hair that the SS didn't have time to do anything with were still lying in camp warehouses. These discoveries are exhibited at the museum. There is an entire glass-walled room piled high with shaved-off hair. There is a MASSIVE room containing 40,000 pairs of victims' shoes.

Some of the punishment cells are also open. I'll leave the details of that to people who want to read about it: go here and search for "block 11". It's hard to believe that all this took place a mere 50 years ago, and not in the Dark Ages.

There was also the opportunity to look through the only gas chamber and crematorium located at Auschwitz I. The others (at Birkenau) were all destroyed by the SS when they fled the camp prior to liberation by the Red Army.

After the museum we took the bus over to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. It's HUGE.



This is the platform where victims would come in via train. Those judged unable to work (a large majority) were immediately sent to the gas chambers. The others were housed in one of the Auschwitz camps and worked to death.



This is the women's camp at Birkenau, which for obvious reasons was a lot smaller than the men's camp, but even it is far too large to fit in shot. It consisted of brick buildings, unlike the men's camp which was mostly wooden barracks. Most of these barracks were burnt down and only the brick chimneys survive. Hopefully these next two images will give an idea of the scope of the men's camp:




More later, but this post is big enough already, I think. Tomorrow I'm catching a plane to Prague at.... 5:30 in the morning. The alternative was a 9-hour train ride, since the Polish trains are, ahem, not quite up to the standard of Western Europe.