Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum Oswiecim

We say goodbye to Lukas and stop distracting him from his studies where his exams only fall 2 days from when we left. It was amazing to catch up after so long, 7 years to be precise, but it was off to Poland we go. 8 hours later, we arrive in Krakow after a changeover at Katowice, Poland unfortunately is not covered by our Eurail ticket.

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This past weekend three other girls and I spent the weekend in Krakow, Poland. First of all let me say- I do not recommend going to Poland in February when it is 2 degrees Fahrenheit. Everyday I was there I wore every single article of clothing that I brought. At one point, I was wearing 8 shirts plus my winter coat, while my friend was …

I was going to include this with my blog on Krakow, but thought better of it, because it deserves its own blog.

Nov 5: Today was our day to visit Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest concentration camp in Europe. I skipped this tour 17-years ago, because I felt it would be too emotionally wrenching. When I visited Hiroshima and the atom bomb …

December 31, 2011

Saturday morning we took about an hour and a half long bus ride around 10am to the Auschwitz concentration camp. We didn't have a professional tour, but they had pamphlets you could buy that provided you with a good route to take to see everything, and had a lot of information within it so we did that.

This camp …

*This is not a poem, or a witty blog entry. When I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau I took these notes to try and give SOME sort of expression for how I felt. But the truth is that words, pictures or presence will never serve my emotions or the terribly atrocities that happened here. We can only remember and hopefully, in remembrance, be brave enough to …

I started the day off at 6am today, arriving at the hostel after a disgusting overnight train from Czech Republic. The seats were horribly thin and old and virtually the whole carriage was empty so not only was it cold, it was really eerie! I expect ghosts were sat next to me throughout most of the journey. Feeling in the spooky mood, when I …

I'm staying in Krakow just inside one of the old city gates, it's very pretty and historical and in sharp contrast to another place which I visit just one hour drive away but definitely not a tourist attraction.

I've an opportunity to see first hand the horrors of genocide and so I'm setting out on a history lesson today.

I'm …

... were liberated by Red Army soldiers on January 27, 1945. A July 2, 1947 act of the Polish parliament established the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of the two extant parts of the camp, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The site was ...