Playing in Europe's Playground a.k.a A Brief Overview of my visit to Poland

As the tour guide on my Krakow city tour mentioned, Poland is considered Eastern Europe as it was behind the Iron Curtain, is now Western Europe in its outlook and mentality, and geographically is part of Central Europe.  I was expecting it to feel like Eastern Europe.  The prices seemed more akin to things I’d find in Eastern Europe, but that’s about it.  Granted, I was in the tourist areas almost the whole time, but I think at least the cities have caught up to Western Europe on many levels.

Of course, in contrast to Georgia and Russia, Poland only suffered under communism for 44 years.  Still, they took their toll.  Independent Poland had a GDP double that of Spain at the beginning of WWII.  In 1989, it was half of Spain’s.  Ouch.

I appreciated that Poland was still a budget traveler’s friend, since even after having to pay way too much for the train from Krakow to Warsaw due to some bad directions from the girl at our hostel (she told us our ticket was for a different and more expensive train than it actually was), I spent less than $300 on the trip.  It doesn’t hurt that the exchange rate with the dollar seemed to be pretty good.  It was difficult not to think of things in terms of Georgian lari.  The dollar is about 1.6 GEL and about 3.5 PLN (but I kept making calculations at 3 złoty to the dollar), so things seemed expensive at first glance until I realized they were very cheap, some things being even cheaper than they would be in Georgia.

January was not such a horrible time to go to Poland, either.  While it was cold, it was no worse than Georgia, and often better than in my village.  Hostels were cheaper and attractions were much less crowded.  We also met lots of Australians, as this is their summer so many take the time to backpack now instead of our summer.  My favorite part was that the cities were still done up for Christmas, with gorgeous lights along the main streets and large Christmas trees in many of the squares.  In Warsaw, I also got to see the last two days of the Christmas market, where stalls selling winter gear, trinkets, and hot food and drink lined the Old Town square.  I also could have bought Elvis’s “Blue Christmas” at one of the stalls selling all sorts of Christmas CDs but refrained.  Nat King Cole would have been a steal, but my backpack is already brimming.

Once I got the hang of the crazy spelling of Polish, I could sound out lots of words and figure out what they meant since they were so similar to Russian.  This helped me out except I still could not speak aside from a handful of very basic words.  One of my tour guides did not like that I suggested Polish and Russian were so similar (he claimed they had about 5% of words in common), but that is because the Poles still have a lot of reasons to hate (dislike, distrust, blame) the Russians.

It’s hard to encapsulate the trip, so I’ll try to hit some highlights.  In Krakow, we spent a day in Auschwitz; a day touring the adorable Old Town, including going inside the Wawel Cathedral and inside St. Mary’s Church (the one on the main square) and getting a taste of Polish karaoke; and I spent the next day taking a tour of Wielczka Salt Mines, a salt mine where miners have carved gorgeous chapels and statues from the rock salt there.  In Warsaw, we walked around the main street and Old Town a lot, spent a full day in the Warsaw Uprising museum (definitely go if you’re interested in WWII Poland or want another reason to hate the Nazis and Stalin), hit up some parts of Jewish Warsaw, drank some of the best hot chocolate I’ve ever had, went to the only working 3-D photo display (Fotoplastikon), went to a park where there were some palace-like homes, and made several trips to the airport.  Food and drinks in Warsaw were definitely more expensive than in Krakow, partly because Krakow still has several milk bars left.  Milk bars are a holdover from the communist era when the government would subsidize cafeterias so that food was incredibly cheap, cheap enough for the common laborer to be able to afford a filling meal out.  I had my fill of pierogis, borscht, paczki (basically jam donuts but they’re a Polish specialty), kebab/schwarma, and plenty of other good Polish treats.

Auschwitz

On my way back from Georgia, I stopped in Poland.  I'll write more about the overall trip later, but here is a bit about Auschwitz.

The original sign was stolen in 2009 (who could do that?) and found in a forest in northern Poland, so this is replica.

The weather seemed so fitting.  A sunny, clear spring day would be marred by the death and destruction of the camp.  Instead, we got frigid drizzly weather, complete with overcast skies and a chill that set into our bones throughout the day.  It’s hard to complain about that since I enjoyed the warmth of a hat, gloves, scarf, good shoes, and a wool coat.  I still was able to understand how miserable the cold would have been for the prisoners of the camp a little better.

We opted to go cheap and not take the group tour but just to buy a little guidebook with a map.  While that is not an option in busier months, I was very glad we did it.  I thought we would be able to go faster than the tour, but we actually spent th entire day there, catching the last bus home.  We soaked in the truth of the horror with little conversation.  In the face of such tragedy and injustice, any words seem inane, complaints ring hollow, jokes profane.  On a cold January Tuesday, Auschwitz was rather empty, yet the tour groups we kept running into still made the place seem too crowded, perhaps because the weight of the camp’s history bears down on you so that you’re forced to wrestle with the extremes of humanity and actual humans can interfere with this process.

There were three camps total, which I didn’t realize. I only thought there were two, Auschwitz and Birkenau.  Those are the two where most people were sent and both are part of the museum.  Auschwitz is much smaller and feels much more like a museum.  You walk through the camp and stop in several different buildings to learn more about the camp.  Most people know that Auschwitz survivors have numbers tattooed on them, but that was only started later, in 1943.  Before that, prisoners were photographed from three different directions when they entered the camp.  Several of the hallways are lined with three rows of photos on either side, with the person’s name, profession, date of entry, and date of death.  More than the written descriptions of the atrocities committed here or statistics, visuals like this got to me.  One building has multiple rooms of things the Nazis pillaged from prisoners.  The museum tells you that these things are the things they could not send back to Germany for her citizens or destroy before the approaching Red Army liberated the camp in 1945.  Thus, the goods were a fraction of the overall goods that were stolen, yet there was a room full of shoes, probably a hundred pair of children’s shoes, a pool of pots and pans, a large room full of suitcases with the prisoner’s names and home addresses still on the side.  The part that got to me the most was the large room of human hair several feet deep.  Pots take up a lot of room; human hair does not.  Some of it was even still braided.

Hair

Shoes

Pots

 

We walked the three kilometers to Birkenau in the cold rain.  I was shocked to see streets of nice, fairly new houses just minutes from Birkenau.  What would it be like to grow up in the shadow of one of the worst atrocities of the 20^th century?  As a child, wouldn’t you want to go play in the big open park nearby?  However, Birkenau is not a place for playing.  In general, silence reigns over both camps, with the press of history and horror robbing you of words.  Birkenau is huge.  There are still some buildings the Germans did not manage to destroy, but even the ones they did destroy still have a chimney and the outline of the bunker.  They go on and on and on.   

The railroad tracks go straight through the middle of Birkenau and end right by the gas chambers.

The bunkers were basically like human chicken coops, with three bunks of wood or brick (can you imagine how cold brick would have been in winter?), designed to sleep around seven prisoners each.

Although the Nazis blew up the gas chambers and crematoria before they left, their location is obvious by the rubble.  You can even see the entrance where the victims would have entered the gas chambers and envision how it must have been.  

Entrance to a gas chamber

In a weird contrast, while walking around the edge of the camp, I saw several small deer or some other woodland creatures prancing along, a shocking sign of life on the grounds of so much death.

It’s hard to say that the visit was good.  Later that night we talked with some Scots in our hostel who had also been to Auschwitz.  One of the girls said that horrible was the best way to describe it.  Normally, if you say a tourist attraction was horrible, you’d never ever recommend it.  But for a place described by tour guides and Pravda as a factory of death, the point is to start to understand the tragedy, to witness the depths of human depravity.  There were also some signs of the strength of the human spirit.  Although pictures of survivors show skeletons that make models look healthy and well-fed, the mere fact that they survived is a sign of their strength.  Prisoners not only endured backbreaking work, torture, starvation, and disease, at risk to their own life they helped their dying fellow prisoners, smuggled letters and other news to the outside world, and even had a strong resistance movement inside the camp.  The group of prisoners responsible for cleaning up the gas chambers even went so far as to blow up one of the chambers in 1944, which put it out of commission forever.

While the museums do fill you up with a lot of facts, most of those can be found in books.  Actually walking the camp grounds brings the tragedy to life.  Birkenau especially made the horror seem real and more awful simply by the sheer size of the place.  While the camp is known as a major site of the Holocaust, especially in the beginning, the camp was the site of death for hundreds of thousands of Poles as well.  This year has made me more and more thankful for the freedom and easy life we have in America, for being spared so many problems other nations have dealt with throughout history.