Krakow: A Sobering History

Top Picture: the marshaling yards at Birkenau where Dr. Mengele seperated families and sent people to there deaths.

2nd: The 'shower' room gas chamber at Aushwitz 1

3rd: The crematorium at Aushwitz 1

4th: Keith eating Polish food (I'm not sure how the picture order comes up)

5th: The train tracks and main gate - Aushwitz 2/Birkenau

Bottom: The main gate at Aushwitz 1 - Work Will Set You Free - the great Nazi lie.

I probably would have gained a lot of weight in Krakow had it not been for the suddenly warm temperatures they experienced beginning the day we got there. The food came in vast quantities and was just tremendous. On our last night there we ate at a restaurant that we had visited earlier for pirogies and had a pork tenderloin brought out to us roasting over fire and spitted on a sabre by a monk. Okay, the server was dressed like the monk, but it sure was cool! If I could upload a video of it you all could see it. Unfortunately, I don't know how to do that yet and I am paying for the internet so you'll all just have to wait.

On Monday we went and visited the most sobering place I've ever seen: the concentration/death camp of Aushwitz-Birkenau. We began early in the morning and took a very hot one-and-a-half hour bus ride from Krakow's main bus terminal to Ocwiecim (the actual Polish name of the town the camp is located at) and got off at the museum. We signed up for a 2 hour English tour to orient ourselves and this was excellent. Having both studied this period of history immensely, we knew a lot about the camps and the Holocaust but actually seeing the place where 1.5 million people (an estimated 980,000 Jews) were murdered by the demons of the S.S. was overwhelming.

Walking through the main gate under the sign the reads "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Sets You Free) was in many senses very erie as one thought of the millions of people who walked under that sign never to return to the outside world. A number of the block houses have been left as they were but many have been turned into museum displays about Jewish history in Poland, the Holocaust, Polish WW II history, and other country's WW II displays. Others displaz relics from the camps. Entire rooms full of shoes, others of clothes, and another with human hair. The enormity of the evil that occured there is indescribable and we often found our emotions running between intense sadness and then anger.

We took a shuttle bus 3 km to the Birkenau site. This camp was built for one purpose only: extermination. The sheer vastness of Birkenau is incredible. It is awful in both senses of the word. While the smaller women's side of the camp that also housed Gypsy families and some Jewish families has brick buildings with most intact, the far larger side of the tracks for the men has only one remaining row of wooden horse stables on concrete slabs. The rest were all demolished after the war except for the chimneys which stretch into the horizon. We walked down the tracks to the marshaling yards where Dr. Mengele, the Angel of Death, seperated people into two columns when they exited the boxcars. A motion of his hand to the left meant that you were deemed good enough to work. A right hand motion meant zou were off to one of the five gas chamber crematorium complexes. We came to the end of the tracks where two of the cremetorium ruins lie. We then walked through the forest down a road through trees where women and children undressed before entering the gas chambers. One of the bath houses (gas chambers) has been turned into a memorial there. We walked back down the tracks and caught the bus back to Aushwity 1 and toured ourselves around.

The experience was sobering, sorrowful, horrifying, and I'd have to say a little life altering. One realizes the dangerous time we live in could easily lead again to such horror. One hopes not, but one's faith in people's ability to resist such evil is shaken when you see such places and sense the enormous loss of life that occured where you are walking now. And above all, one is struck by the need for the grace of God to save humankind from itself. May we never forget what happened there.

Tuesday we toured the Jewish Ghetto and the Oskar Schindler factory in Krakow which helped raise our spirits. We also climbed the bell tower to meet and listen to Krakow's trumpeter play the bugle calls from the tower. It was a lighter day in which we did things to lighten our spirits.

But I will never forget what I have seen on Monday. Go and see such places. Those who remember history will help insure such things never happen again.