Poland: Kraków and Auschwitz

When some friends went to Poland last semester, it immediately struck me as a unique – even exotic – destination for a weekend trip. Not quite West, not quite East (but certainly North), the only image Poland really had in my head was one of snow, and chocolate, and pierogi and sausage, and my dad, who’d gone to Poland for a conference when I was six years old. But the girls from last semester had given it good reviews (especially the cheapness, which was a pleasant break from the tiring expense of Italy), so I tried to make sure it happened. Luckily, ten other women from this semester were game to come with me, and so on January 31 we flew from Rome to Kraków for a roller-coaster weekend that would leave us stricken, exhausted, and somehow deeply satisfied.

On Friday we arrived in Kraków and immediately set out for some pierogi, traditional Polish dumplings, for our afternoon meal. (We were especially delighted when we converted the price from Polish złoty to euros and learned how inexpensive these delicious delicacies can be.) Thoroughly satisfied by the warm, savory lunch, we headed to Stare Miasto, Kraków’s old market and the largest medieval square in Europe. Seven of us took a horse-drawn carriage for a quick tour of the city, spotting the famous Wawel Castle and several well-known churches on our way while bundling up from the intense cold beneath a blanket. We met up with our other friends afterward in Saint Mary’s Basilica (a fitting meeting point), where we paused to pray and admire the beautiful interior, especially the deep blue ceiling speckled with painted stars. After some hot chocolate and cider, we explored the Cloth Hall marketplace and perused the beautiful handmade souvenirs, from carved wooden boxes and chess sets to delicate amber and titanium jewelry. We indulged in more traditional Polish food (cabbage rolls, anyone?) for dinner and another cup of hot chocolate before turning in early for our Saturday ventures.

           

Pierogi, Polish dumplings filled with cheese, potatoes, meat, and magic

Saint Mary's Basilica

Though we all enjoyed trekking around the beautiful city, the definite apex was our tour of Auschwitz, which you probably recognize as being the most notorious of the Nazi concentration camps. We had decided to include Auschwitz in our plans because we felt it was something we should do, since we were able. At the end of the day, we all agreed that we were glad to have done it. But it was an experience unlike anything I’d ever done and one that I’m certain to never forget.

            

Early Saturday morning, we rose and took a two-hour bus ride to Oświęcim, the Polish city that houses the Auschwitz camps. I was annoyed because I’d lost one of my gloves at the station and tired from an impromptu nap against the icy window of the bus, but immediately upon disembarking I was struck by a new feeling. We couldn’t see anything but the plain brick entrance building, yet there was a distinctly grim air that everyone seemed to feel. No one spoke loudly or moved too quickly. After we met our tour guide and received our audio sets, we moved quietly into the first camp.

            

As soon as I stepped outside and saw the infamous wrought-iron gate proclaiming the bitterly ironic Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work will set you free”), I was gripped by an intense physical reaction that caught me completely off guard. It was like a fist had suddenly clenched in my chest, rooting me to the spot, and for a fleeting moment I was overwhelmed by foreboding. I did not want to go any further. Something awful had happened here, and though my mind had known it all along, my very body was at once repelled by it. In a second it was over, and I was able to follow the group forward. But from then on, there was a sick feeling in my stomach that periodically intensified as we moved from site to site, reflecting on the horror that had reigned here just seventy years earlier.

            

The gate into Auschwitz I

We paused before a plain wall of a plain building, where a pep band would assemble every morning and play German marches so the inmates would keep time as they marched to their labor for the day. We passed neat rows of austere brick buildings that might have been offices or army barracks or even schools in a gentler world. We drifted through the rooms one barrack in burgeoning revulsion, past great piles of possessions left behind by victims who were assured they would be needing them in the future. Eyeglasses. Hairbrushes. Shoe polish containers. Suitcases, with the owners’ names and birthdates carefully inscribed on them. Shoes. Crutches and prosthetics. Thousands and thousands and thousands of these daily effects, displayed in enormous rooms to accommodate the enormous numbers that were only a fraction of what had been found. Tiny cotton shirts and minuscule leather boots belonging to children. Piles and piles of human hair, shaved from women’s corpses and shipped off to be woven into blankets for German soldiers. Mostly dark hair or gray, but every now and then there was a visible lock of blonde amid the sea of braids. Blonde like mine.
            

In disbelief we looked at the cans– each of which was responsible for one hundred deaths – of innocent blue cyanide pellets that had dropped down in the gas chambers to suffocate the two thousand victims who would be exterminated within twenty minutes. We passed through a hallway of photographs taken of inmates before the Nazis began tattooing numbers for identification instead, because within months their prisoners wouldn’t look anything like their former selves. We saw the mats on which they slept, the cell blocks in which dozens were starved to death (including Maximilien Kolbe, who was later canonized), and the gallows from which dozens more were hanged as a warning. We circled the hospital where the cruelest experiments imaginable were performed, especially on women, and the square in which they were forced to stand at attention for hours on end. We stood before the wall against which thousands of political convicts were shot. And we passed through the only remaining gas chamber – with nail marks still visible on the walls – and the adjoined crematorium, its chimney still thrust hatefully into the air.

            

The "hospital" where many Jewish women underwent forced sterilization experiments

The gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz I

It is impossible to understand such a place as Auschwitz without visiting it. It is impossible to comprehend the scale of the operation – and the thoughtful, meticulous planning that went into each sickening step – because the mind simply cannot accept it unless it is forced to confront it. I had read Anne Frank’s diary and even visited the Secret Annexe. I had seen Schindler’s List. I had studied the Holocaust in school and encountered it in dozens of novels and movies and articles. I thought I understood it. And I suppose I did understand it, as much as I could have. But to face it is to understand it in a new way. And though many things were impressed on me in ways they hadn’t before, the most disturbing was the realization that the scale of the project – the enormousness and the enormity – was reflective of just how many people had been involved. As tempting as it is to pretend Adolf Hitler was a superhuman villain at war against the world, the reality is that he would have been utterly obscure had no one corroborated. He would have been insignificant if only a few had listened. But thousands and thousands and thousands not only listened but agreed, and not only agreed but took action. And the result was millions of murders – planned, manufactured, and repeated. And so when one visits Auschwitz, it is not the shadow of a defeated nemesis that haunts you. It is the knowledge that the darkness that drove the Holocaust was not that of one man but of millions, of all humanity. That's what you truly face when confronted with evil like this: the darkness within.

            

After completing a two-hour tour of Auschwitz’s original camp, we took a short shuttle to Auschwitz II Birkenau, with its infamous train tracks leading to the largest of the Auschwitz sites. Largely destroyed by panicking Nazis who realized the war was lost, the scope of the place was still apparent, with the ruins of two gas chambers left completely untouched after they were bombed shortly before liberation in 1945. A lone cattle car was perched on one of the tracks, recovered by a Holocaust survivor and donated in memory of the thousands of Hungarian Jews killed there. Candles commemorated the selection point where Nazi doctors would determine after a single glance whether an inmate was healthy enough to live. And at the end of the tracks was a large memorial with inscriptions in over twenty languages, asking that this place be a “cry of despair and a reminder to humanity.”

            

The train tracks of Auschwitz II Birkenau

One of the cattle cars used for transporting prisoners into Auschwitz

The remains of a gas chamber and crematorium

The final half hour was something of a whirlwind as we visited the barracks on the women’s half of the camp and the gravestones beside a large spread of ashes dumped near one of the crematoria. We left our tour guide and spent the bus ride home in exhausted, contemplative silence. Trying to lift our spirits, we watched a children’s dance exhibition in the Kraków mall before doing some light souvenir shopping and enjoying a delicious traditional meal of pierogi, kiełbaska, potato pancakes, and mead. Over dinner, we talked about what we’d experienced and shared our lingering thoughts, which coupled with the warm food served as a cathartic finish to a life-changing day.

The English plaque on the memorial at Auschwitz II Birkenau

I felt – and still do feel – humble and grateful to have shared this day with these women. I’m also genuinely glad to have visited Auschwitz. I think it is important, vitally so, and that everyone who can see it should. One comes away with more than I could ever hope to express in a blog post – no matter how long it is – after seeing it and feeling it. I have thought about that place deeply every day since, and about the people. Their faces have lingered in my mind, and I hope they continue to do so. Because it's really the least we can do, as well as the most powerful. To remember. Forever.

Auschwitz I