| (Click on any photo for a larger version.) |
 Angela on the train |
 Typical small Polish train station |
 Arriving in Oswiecim |
 Entering Auschwitz Camp |
 Arbeit Macht Frei - "Work Makes You Free" |
 Guard tower |
 Barracks |
| On Friday evening, we caught a sleeper train for the 14 hour overnight ride to Auschwitz. The sleeper trains are wonderful and once you get into Eastern Europe, very reasonably priced. Travelling by rail gives you the chance to talk with other people from various locations and find out what they're doing there, and that's fun. The trains and bedding are clean and actually quite comfortable - it's kinda nice getting rocked to sleep by the motion of the train. But it's not all that nice being woken up in the middle of the night at a border by some uniformed guy demanding something from you in Polish - you just hand over your passport and smile, hoping that's what he's asking for. It was also a little disturbing making the same train journey through Poland that several million people were forced to make against their will during WWII. So it's about 8am, and we get off the train in Oswiecim, rural South Central Poland. Pretty much in the heart of former Communist Europe. Poland is weird. It's hard to say exactly why. Partially because it's a former Eastern Bloc country which hasn't yet come up to Western standards (and may never make it there); partially because it's a poor country; partially because we were in a rural area. Adam described it as, "You know those pictures you saw of Poland during WWII? Well, remove the tanks and add color, and that's what it looks like now." There's a feeling of despair and gloom. And we're standing out like three sore thumbs, being stared at by all the locals (no other tourists got off the train). It all lent to a definite air of surrealism. After some bumbling about - exchanging money and reserving our sleeper car for the trip out of there that evening - we hop on a bus to the Auschwitz museum. To add to the surrealness, we arrive at the Auschwitz Museum only to find a parking lot full of tour buses and some semblance of civilization as we know it, *there*, of all places. Auschwitz is completely amazing. The concentration camp is open as a museum to preserve the memory of what happened there, and you are free to wander the grounds and even to explore some of the buildings. The most notable and striking feature is that the camp is *nice*. The camp is made up of about 28 two-story brick buildings surrounded by grass and tree-lined roads/walkways; it was originally barracks for Polish soldiers before the Germans occupied Poland and "repurposed" it. Your first thought is, "This looks like a nice place to live," and *that's* disturbing. Even the gas chamber/crematorium building, which is partially underground, is covered with grass and little wild daisies. It was a warm sunny day when we were there, and as Angela put it, "It was some guy's job to sit on the roof, admiring the sunshine and the daisies and the singing birds, then he opens a trapdoor on the roof and throws in a gas canister to kill some Jews, and goes on to admire the sunshine again." What the fuck? We also took a short trip to what was left of Birkenau ("Auschwitz II"), a few miles away. (Three-quarters of the camp was destroyed by the SS at the end of the war.) That was a little more of what you would expect a concentration camp to look like - rows upon rows of drafty wood buildings in a cleared out field. At least it wasn't pretty. It's true what they say about the Germans - they are efficient. German engineering is superior, their products are well-made and everything works with a minimum of waste. Unfortunately, this also applied to their concentration camps to a degree which was spooky. Not only were millions of people murdered and tortured, it was all done in a completely calculated and planned fashion. In Birkenau, there was one building with toilet facilities. The toilets all drained into an area where the waste was collected and used to process methane gas to heat the prisoner's quarters. Sound efficient? Wait, it gets better. Hair was shaved off of prisoners and used to make coats for the soldiers, and fat was cut from victims' corpses and used to make soap. Our tour guide was a Polish man who was a teenager during WWII. He spent time in a slave labor camp during the war, and was given soap on which was embossed three letters - initials which stood for the German translation of "Pure Jewish Fat". The camps were indeed "death factories". Even after going to Auschwitz and Birkenau, it's still hard to fathom everything that happened there, especially the scale with which it happened. You hear about millions of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, etc. being killed, but it's still hard to picture it. Then you see a room full of artificial limbs, another room full of toothbrushes and hairbrushes, and you are told that after the war, bags containing SEVEN TONS of human hair were found, and it starts to sink in. Visiting Auschwitz is not a happy or uplifting experience, but it is well worth it. If you're anywhere near Central Europe, go visit it. You won't regret it, and you certainly will never forget it. |
 Panorama of Birkenau |
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 Interior of the gas chamber |
 The crematorium ovens |
 Toilet barracks |
