Krakow

So on a spur-of-the-moment decision, Mathew and I decided to spend Friday and Saturday in Krakow. We took a night train on Thrusday night and arrived early on Friday. After find a place to stay, we purchased tickets to the famous Wielicza Salt Mines and for Auschwitz, one on each day. After walking into the city center for breakfast, we headed back to the hostel where a tour bus picked us up and drove us the 20ish minutes to the mines.



With over 3000 total rooms, the salt mines are an incredible place to visit. Carved by the miners, not professional artists, there are countless statues, pictures, and exquisite designes carved into the salt. The tour only goes through twenty or thirty of the rooms (less than 1% of everything that is there), but I still felt I got my money's worth. At the depths (135 meters) there are restaurants, underground ponds, even a cathedral where weddings are still performed. You walk down an endless spiral of stairs to get to the bottom. There were seven steps between each of the 53 or 54 landings on the way down. Luckily we got to ride the elevator back up.



After arriving back to Krakow, we went around the City Center and saw the city castle and several other buildings around the Main Square that the city offers. The tours were all sold out at the castle, but we were still able to go up and walk around all the buildings.



The next day we got to go to Auschwitz. It was absolutely incredible, though it was hard to really grasp where we were. Like Stalin said "One death is a tragedy; a million is a statistic." It is too hard to grasp the enormity of the numer 1,000,000.



The first part of the tour was at Auschwitz I where there are 28 cell blocks, a kitchen, SS Offices, Administrative Buildings, the place where Cyclone B gas was first tested, Crematorium I (the original crematorium), a hospital for soldiers, and a hospital (known to prisoners as the 'crematorium waiting room') for the prisoners. We got to tour two of the cell blocks there. One had been turned into a museum-type building full of information, pictures, rooms full of human hair, eye glasses, brushes, shoes, and empty bags, while the other was still in it's original state. It had a courtroom where once per month SS Officers heard petty crimes that prisoners were accused of. Most of these prisoners recieved the death sentence. Right outside this office was the execution wall where the sentences were served by the Commanding Officer on duty.



The rest of the building was rooms where the prisoners slept, except for the basement which was full of dicipline rooms. Some of them were holding cells for the crematorium while others were only one square meter large where four men were required to stand all night and still expected to perform a full days work. Most of these individuals died either of exhaustion, suffocation, or were killed because they couldn't perform their duties at work. We also got to walk through the place where the first mass-gassings were performed (until they were deemed 'too inefficient') in the same building as the first crematorium.



After the tour at Auschwitz I was over, we went to Birkenau (aka Auschwitz II). This is the place most people think of when they hear "Auschwitz". Here is where "The Platform" is located where the SS Officer would point to the left (death) or the right (work). Three crematoriums were here, though two of them were destroyed by the Nazi's right before beginning the Death March. Birkenau is a sprawling complex of tons and tons of barracks. Some are wooden stables, originally built to house 52 horses while others are bricks sent there from other parts of Poland from destroyed buildings. These stables had been modified to house at a minimum 400 prisoners. After several epidemics went through the camp killing many officers as well as prisoners (one epidemic killed over 30,000 of the 100,000 prisoners housed here) it was decided that sanitation buildings were needed. Until this point, one or a few buckets were in each stable for over 400 people (90% had diarrhea). The sanitation rooms were the sames size as the stables. In one half of the room was three concrete slabs with circular holes drilled in them. The other half had troughs filled with water for the prisoners to wash in. There were three sanitation rooms built per sixteen dorms; 2133 prisoners used each sanitation rooms every morning. That was the only time they were allowed, and they were rushed through it being beaten and/or killed if they went too slowly.



There is also an Auschwitz III which houses another Crematorium, and there are over 40 sub-camps around the entire complex. A huge factory is nearby where the prisoners all worked at. We did not get to see all of these other things.



After this, we spent the rest of the day seeing the other side of Krakow, walking down to the river, seeing Schindler's factory, and an incredible Jewish cemetary. We took the night train back on Saturday and arrived back in Krakow early this morning. We will be Skyping Bern again for services.