Auschwitz and Wieliczky
Trip Start
Jan 06, 2006
1
45
120
Trip End
Sep 02, 2008
Krakow,
Poland
Friday, March 31, 2006
I took a crowded minibus to Ozwetzim (the Polish name for the town of Auschwitz). I visited the smaller concentration camp of Auschwitz, whose bunkhouses have been converted into a museum for the memory of the camp's victims. There were the cells in the basements to see, rooms full of items stolen from the inmates: shoes, combs, suitcases... there were photos of the victims, memorials where men where shot against a brick wall, and a small gas chamber and crematorium. After some potatoe pancakes at the cafeteria, I walked a mile to Birkenau.
Birkenau is the second part of Auschwitz and better known in our collective imagination as the place where so many of the victims of the Holocaust were gassed. It is entered by a large gate with tracks beneath, so designed that trains could unload their passengers only meters from their final destinations. I took photos from the observation tower on top of the railway gate and stood in awe at Birkenau's scale.
It was late in the day, and all of the school aged visitors were already on their buses back to their hostels when I found myself standing by the destroyed gas chambers. The sun was an hour from sunset and I found myself genuinely surprised by the fact that the trees at Birkenau are identical to the trees in Edmonton - mostly Poplar, some Birch - and the snow had just melted. My allergies (which bother me otherwise only in Edmonton) were acting up. I stood in front of the ruins for a long time.
I stared into the middle distance and when I think about how I reacted, I responded to it like a lot of us responded to the September 11th Acts of Mass Terror. I had no caricatured emotional response. It was more like facing an undeniable and daunting truth. My mind turned to grand thoughts and sweeping historical conclusions. I thought that the Holocaust was unfortunate. I remembered why I stopped reading about the Holocaust three years ago. My mind turned to other sad genocides through History and I deemed History unfortunate and I wondered why I still read so much history. I thought, nobly, that I must be a stoic type to face this sort of thing.
I walked further around the site and at the second gas chamber, I ran into Jim and Greg from Toronto (they had Canada flags on their bags) and they took my photo. Three deer are barely visible in the background grazing just beyond the fence. Just further down the path is a greyscale picture, etched in stainless steel, of a group of soon-to-be victims. They are dishevelled after ten days' trip in over packed trains, standing crowded among the pine trees unaware that their deaths are only moments away. A tired mother, maybe twenty-two, stands with her baby in her arms. A sixteen year old boy leans against a tree just behind her.
I always wondered why there were never any real uprisings from among the millions of people who were gassed at Birkenau. I understand why so much better after seeing the site, and reading about where all the victims came from. They came from hundreds of kilometres away, packed into trains like cattle. I know how I am after even a few hours on an aeroplane. After a long transatlantic flight with three layovers, I am capable of doing nothing but crawling into bed. I cannot imagine how miserable I would be after ten days of that, but I figure that the very first thing that I would want would be a hot shower - if you didn't know it, the Nazis lured the Holocaust victims directly off trains and into gas chambers by advertising the chambers as shower facilities. The ash of the ovens was explained as the by-product of burning so much wood to heat up so much water.
Not all of the arrivals at Birkenau were immediately gassed. Some were transferred into jail blocks and these lie east of the gas chambers and crematoriums. They are long rectangles fenced with barbed wire and they were filled with semi permanent cabins jam packed with people. The cabins are gone, but their foundations and the barbed wire remains. I walked into one of the rectangles and, without another single soul in sight, peered at the places where people were hung as examples, where the masses of prisoners used the toilet, and where the dozens of smokestacks stand as reminders of those over packed cabins.
All that was left of the cabins is the brick and concrete, albeit smashed up. It's not like Roman or Greek sites, made of eternal Limestone or Granite. Brick is used in my house, and concrete too. Some of the ceramic that was used in the smokestacks looked as fresh as a newly cast porcelain urinal. God, I couldn't help but think, this really did not happen very long ago.
I walked to the end of the cell block, perhaps 800 meters from its gate. I had thought that the wire may not have been complete. When I found out that it was, I realised that I had to walk the 800 meters back to the cell block gate, and then back another 800 meters to reach the main gate of the camp. I looked at the watch I was wearing and realised that it was already six thirty, and I had been exploring the Auschwitz/Birkenau death camp complex for six hours. I panicked. The last train back to Krakow, an hour's ride, would leave the station at ten minutes to seven. And the station lies three and a half kilometres from the Birkenau Gate.
I couldn't think of having to actually spend the night somewhere in the town of Auschwitz (even if it is a modern, functioning town). And then I decided that I had to commit a sort of sacrilege to escape back to Krakow for the night. The only way that I could get out in time was to go through the wire and sprint back to the train station. Under close examination, the ground underneath the barbed wire was lower in one spot, by approximately twenty centimetres. I took the wires (there were two of them every twenty centimetres; from the ground to the top of the three meter posts) and lifted them up to the next wire, and using the barbs, stuck them together. It left me just more than thirty centimetres to crawl beneath. I did.
As I bolted down the train tracks and out the gate, I realised how impossible my escape would have been had anyone tried to stop me. When this place was an operating death camp, the wire was electrified. The course to the gate was three hundred meters of unobstructed machine-gun range of fire. To have been a prisoner there would have been utter despair.
I just made it in time to buy my ticket. Moments before the train was to arrive, an announcement was projected across the platform that the train to Krakow would be an hour late in leaving. There was time to buy a meal and chat with a fellow from Alabama who was sitting in the station doing his reading for a course in Scottish literature and damning every sentence of it. He was going in another direction. Later on my train I spoke with a bunch of louts from the UK who were in Krakow for the weekend (thanks to Easyjet). Their friends back in Krakow were smashed every minute of it. They were soon to join them after an hours' sobering interlude at Auschwitz.
* * *
Before I left Krakow, I visited the famous salt mine at Wieliczky. The entrance fee cost me as much as a night's stay in Krakow (and that wasn't cheap either) but to see one of the great wonders of Eastern Europe it really wasn't too much to pay. The salt mines are integral to the region's history; they were a source of wealth back in the middle ages. To be a salt miner carried a certain prestige and it had material benefits. Miners are still working away in its depths, but the older regions of the mine can be visited by tourists.
The chambers that are on display are entirely carved from rock salt and they are deep below ground. Some chambers interpret the technological means, over the centuries, that salt was carried to the surface. Other chambers display the scientific composition of the salt and the means of its deposit over geological history. There are some old tools that were forgotten for years, and when recovered, were found to be encrusted in salt. Other chambers show the ancient administration of the mines, other chambers display local history. A few chambers have life-size rock salt sculptures. There is a chapel, an enormous cathedral with all its decorations from the floor, the wall sculptures and the chandeliers carved from salt, and a dance hall. There is a cafeteria 50 meters below the surface for tourists, and a few lakes where they held concerts and rowed boats in the past. The tunnels are 320 kilometres long and growing. The salt mine visit didn't make me think about the world but it was a marvel worthy of attention nonetheless.
