Day 251: Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial

Harrowing day today. Auschwitz is probably the most popular tourist attraction in Poland, and is very difficult to visit without a pre-arranged tour. So we'd booked a tour a few days earlier. Our bus picked us up just near our apartment, a typical minivan with around 12 seats. 90 minutes ride out to the town.

These days the town is known as Oswiecim (Auschwitz is actually the Germanic version of the name) and surprisingly large. First stop was Auschwitz-1, original main camp and the site of an old Polish army barracks. This is where the famous "Arbeit Macht Frei" sign is located. We spent the next 2 hours walking around the camp, following the guide. It's very regimented, where basically everyone does the same tour in the same order in roughly 5-minute increments.

The tour went through the history of the place, the first occupants (Polish dissidents and resistance leaders), and slowly moved through the deportation and incarceration of Polish Jews, but also Jews from all over Europe. It's hard to stomach the stories of not only mass killings, but the profiteering that went along with it. Many people were tricked into paying their train fares to the camp, gold teeth were extracted from corpses and melted down, long hair was shaved off and re-used in pillows, linens etc. People were told to bring their tools and valuables with them, which were of course immediately stolen. Awful stuff. One room had an enormous display with piles of plaited human hair that was quite hard to look at.

After a couple of hours, we had a quick break and then headed to Auschwitz-2 - the camp known as Birkenau. "Auschwitz" itself was actually a complex of over 40 separate camps, though only these two have remained - Birkenau being far larger. An entire village was razed to make way for it, and it held 80,000 people at one point. This was where the mass killings were taken to their logistical extreme - the train lines into the camp terminated right next to the gas chambers.

People were disembarked, separated into those who could and couldn't work. If you could work, you were marched off to the prison, if you couldn't it was straight into the gas chambers. Two of the five gas chamber/crematorium buildings still remain, though both are in ruins as the SS blew them up at the end of the war in an attempt to hide their crimes. I've seen them before at the other concentration camp I've visited (Mauthausen in Austria), but it's still an awful sight.

This tour was quite a bit shorter, as it seemed much less of the camp was open for viewing. We were still herded around on a strict schedule, though there was a huge group of what I assume were Israeli teenagers on a school tour wandering around and behaving extremely poorly. Nothing egregious, just typical teenager shit that doesn't belong in a memorial. Anyway.

Back to the bus where we drove the 90 minutes back to Krakow, suitably chastened. Chilled out for a while at home before heading out for dinner. Visited an Israeli restaurant nearby that we'd seen a few times and had good reviews - very tasty. Great hummus and our chicken tagine was excellent. Nice way to finish off our time in Krakow!Read more