from Pillar to Post: a traveller's guide to stuff: Cracovia and the Nazis

I finished up my last day at work for St. Mungo's fundraising in a place called Slough. That name may ring a bell for some of you as the location of the Wernham Hoggs branch in the UK's comedy, "The Office". The place, as depicted in the show, is really not all that interesting. There is a pub there bearing the Wernham Hoggs name, though, which I was quite excited about although none of my workmates shared my enthusiasm.
The following day, the last Wednesday of September, I finished packing my stuff at Tom's house, made a quick - and expensive! - stop at the Australian consulate for some signatures for my replacement driver's licence, and jumped on a bus (slowly becoming my preferred, and possibly favourite form of transport) which was to take me across 6 countries to a city in the south of Poland. Similar to my experience with the Lyon-London bus haul, there was a change from day to night followed by a necessary change the other way, many truck stops and several changes of scenery. This time around, however, the trip was a tedious but bearable 26 hours long, we took a ferry across the Channel instead of the tunnel, the language used on the road signs changed 5 times, the bus drivers couldn't speak English, and I was at the start of a period of travel as opposed to the end of one. The destination was Kraków.
This city, clearly European in architecture and ambience, provided a delightful change from the London landscape. Its colourful buildings, sometimes run down but always grand, its traditional buskers in Europe's largest medieval town square, the Rynek Główny (and it is big!), and the factory made famous by Schindler for helping save thousands of Jews from extermination by the Nazis who had a stronghold over the region, all add to the city's intrigue and at the same time act as reminders of the interesting and, at times tragic past surrounding not just Kraków (pronounced kra-kov), but the entire country.
I arrived at the central bus/train terminal about the same time that Lee arrived from Warsaw. We walked around for a few hours with our backpacks before Miguel came to meet us in the city centre and took us to his house across the river near the Jewish quarter. He is working in Poland until the end of the year and had only set up base one week before we arrived, but was kind enough to let us crash on his floor (literally a wooden floor) for a few nights anyway. Unfortunately we didn't get to spend too much time with him as he was working or otherwise occupied for most of our time there. The first night, however, we met up with his (mainly Spanish) group of mates in a cosy pub which was nice, but not before being unluckily fined 72.5zł (about $35) each on the tram there for not having bought a ticket. I guess that's what you get for trying to save a bit of cash..
Our first full day there was spent just wandering around the small city centre, with the Rynek Główny at its heart. With our very limited funds, we made a decision to not visit too many attractions (of which there aren't an excessive number in Kraków anyway) but instead spend our time observing the culture and just generally hanging out. So we did. The prominent Wawel castle and cathedral at the southern end of the city centre, both iconic symbols of Poland, were added to our list of attractions-to-be-missed, but this was not too disappointing as - let's face it - there's only a certain number of castles you can visit before they all start looking the same (not unlike museums). Our focus was more on the food and lifestyle, with a milk kitchen (serving traditional and cheap Polish food) being one of the first venues we ate in.
The following day was dedicated to Auschwitz - this was one 'attraction' we could not miss. Auschwitz (Oświęcim in Polish) is the location where, in 1940, a disused army barracks site was expanded by the Nazis to become the largest centre ever used for the extermination of European Jews. A further 2 concentration camps, Birkenau and Monowitz, were set up nearby soon after, and between the three they succeeded in mass murdering between one and 1.5 million Jews and other people deemed unfit to live by the Nazis. Many of these prisoners were tricked by the Nazis into thinking they had been offered wonderful jobs in a far away city - some had even been sold fictitious properties - only to be rounded up and crammed into train cargo containers ready for the long journey (sometimes upto 10 days with no food or water supplies, causing a lot of deaths before even reaching the camp) to the equivalent of Hell on Earth. This promise of a new start meant that most people had brought along their most prized and expensive possessions which were then confiscated by the Nazis and either sold or kept by the soldiers as a prize.
Upto 10,000 people were killed on any one day in the camps and their bodies were then burnt in the on-site crematorium. The majority of those killed were Jews sent directly to the gas chamber within minutes of arriving at the camp and without any formal processing (which makes it virtually impossible to identify who they were). With the sheer volume of people they were sending to these death chambers, their gas supplies would occasionally run low and this meant people were sometimes still alive when taken to the crematorium. During our visit we were able to walk through one of these gas chambers and adjoining crematorium, the yards and the buildings where the prisoners were kept, including the rooms where they were made to sleep on heshen bags atop concrete flooring and the "standing" torture room which was not big enough for one to lay down in but in which some prisoners were held for upto a week - it really was a surreal and terrifiying experience. I have goosebumps just writing about it now.
Medical experiments on prisoners were routine, especially in trying to achieve mass sterilisation of the Jewish population, which often resulted in the patient either dying or suffering permanent and horrific injuries. Many prisoners were literally worked to death - they were subjected to backbreaking labour for over 12 hours a day on minimal rationing of food, and to top it off had to carry back the dead bodies at the end of each day through the gate to the camp bearing the infamous and mocking words "Arbeit Macht Frei" - Work Brings Freedom.
Just outside the city are some extraordinary salt mines definitely worth seeing. We visited this Unesco World Heritage site in Wieliczka on our last day in Kraków. These massive mines that have been worked for hundreds of years were made famous by the churches and shrines built underground by the miners themselves. Huge structures carved into the salt itself ranging from a crowned king and an angel to a replica of "The Last Supper" and a lifesize sculpture of the late Pope John Paul II in one of the many massive halls 135 metres underground. The highlight of that excursion would definitely have to have been the underground store that sold Lotto tickets, though.

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