Krakow (and Poland, by necessity) plus Auschwitz

We were sad to leave Prague… but we were a bit over how the staff (newsagents/bar staff/waiters/ticket sellers) were mostly over tourists. Especially ’English’ tourists (which we are doomed to be mistaken for everywhere. Nick and I have said how crap it is that the two main English speaking lots of tourists are the English (bad rep for rudeness) and the americans (ditto, but for loudness AND rudeness). Anyway, trip east through Czech was a dream. Of course. Until I noticed in the lonely planet shoestring guide (thanks Kyle and Mossy) that there were only a few specific crossings into Poland that would accept foreigners. And we BOTH noticed that the turn off that the GPS had taken was essentially a dirt track through farmland in the middle of nowhere… towards mountain range. I.e. not going to be one of the sweet border crossings. After a bit of fiddling about (I.e. making executive decisions against the GPS’ instructions) we made it to the Czech-Polish border at Csesky-Tesin… and whizzed right through, past abandoned border booths. So we have no idea if we did the right thing, or if it was much ado about nothing, but we both knew that the pitted, gravel road through completely non-English speaking areas was a bad idea.

As was Poland altogether. According to Nick, anyway, but we’ll get to that.

Immediately upon crossing into Poland we found out why the GPS was giving us such an (apparently, to us) erroneous-looking estimated arrival time. Poland’s roads are crap. What is marked as a ’motorway’ in our map book, is a one lane road with no overtaking areas, doglegging through every dilapidated and miserable village heading east. And it was not scenic. Just flat, dilapidated and depressing. Poor Poland. Because the country is too poor to have… footpaths, people just walk along the side of the road (on ‘motorway’, further slowing traffic) and we discovered a phenomenon we saw reflected everywhere in Poland, but which stopped abruptly at the Polish-Slovak border on the way out… noone has anywhere to be, and so cyclists just lazily pedal on the motorway… further slowing traffic. It ended up being around an 8 hour day to travel a 540km journey. There are also shrines to Mary sporadically on the side of the road (sometimes only 100m apart, but always decked out with fresh flowers and usually on what would be a really dangerous blind corner, if you weren’t going at 40km/hr behind an impassive Pole on a bike with nowhere to be. One crazy thing we saw was an old man (70+) standing in the middle (proper middle, and STANDING) waving his walking stick angrily at every car that went past. We thought maybe it was us (German number plate, and he held a grudge) but it really was EVERY car.

In that trip we also learnt a phrase that we would soon become familiar with, heard immediately after programming your next destination into the GPS - ‘warning: your destination is located in a restricted access area’. So we arrived in Krakow. To be led to a dead end street. Or rather, we thought it was a dead end for us because of all of the crazy polish parking on both sides of the road. We never got a good pic of the streets (and we certainly were not in the mood at that point to) but they park… diagonally, nose in, and reverse parallel wherever they can find a spare both of side walk. Welcome to the real eastern Europe. Subsequently parking (in paid parking that costs more than a dinner for two with drinks in Krakow) we looked at the lonely planet guide to discover that the street the GPS directed us to, had indeed been a dead end. And the restricted access area that we were warned about… was a pedestrian area.

So we walked in to the main hostel. Got served by the most sour polish (or any type of) girl I have ever met. Got told to get passports. Went back, got packs, got passports… Surrendering my passport at that dark hell hole to that harridan was the second scariest thing I have ever done (but more on that for the Croatia blog). Then we were instructed (with a smirk) to walk back, past our car carrying our packs to the accommodation.

What a scam. Musty, 3 HUGE flights of stairs in the freezing dank hallway to get to a room without a phone, with a sofabed futon as the ’luxurious’ double they provided, hot water that ran out in the morning (but refreshed at night),with broken wifi (which I believe was just a wifi modem plugged into a wall with no paid internet connection) and with the 60 channels of satellite tv they skited about being… in Polish. Minus a news channel (which we had watched on 24 hour Pope-visit-to-England broadcast for 3 days in Prague) and a sports channel. That was it. It was cemented. Nick hated Poland, Krakow, Flamingo Doubles and the Poles. We honestly considered leaving right then. Just wiping Poland. But we agreed to sleep on it…

The stairwell to our place... Doesn’t capture the dankness. Can’t blog smells, unfortunately.

We did a spin around Market Square that night (yawn, charming, but couldn’t hold a candle to Old Town Square in Prague) but agreed that we were only going to hate on… the food, the service, the sights and Poland in totality, so beered and fooded at a café and got the heck back to our miserable little dive for fitful sofabed sleeps.

Krakow street in the early morning. It was very chilly - gave the jumpers a work out most days, and DEFINITELY in the night. Brrr. Was crisp and nice, I guess, although I dread to think of their bitterly cold winters.
By day....
Market Square...

The next morning was beautiful and we went and saw Krakow’s only other sight, Wawel Hill (which is their castle, but it was allowed to fall down a couple of hundred years ago and then they rebuilt it to its former glory (well, charming standard. It was pretty cool but hardly glorious). Here’s the obligatory pics…

Looking up at Wawel Hill as we stroll in.
Wawell Hill from the outside.
Nick walking under the portcullis thing.
Building in the castle grounds. It was SUCH a nice day for it. And we really just wandered around enjoying the sunshine and the views - and the substantially smaller crowds, when compared to Prague.
Above is the ‘palace’ part of the castle

We also scored free tickets to the Treasury and Armoury, which were both pretty interesting, being smattered with the occasional English translation, but mostly just falling into the category of ’cool stuff’.

Coronation sword of polish kings. For a bit.
Axe-gun. For when ’just killing them’ isn’t enough. And yes, I know those old guns took 40min to load, so it probably got some use.
Armour.

Back to regaling the crap facilities of the hostel… after castle time we thought we’d attend to our desperate need for some clothes washing. So we went back to sour puss (sigh). The hostel had said it had washing facilities… should be sweet, yeah? Which is technically correct. Having carted our stuff to the other building (in our baby backpacks, of course) we discovered that yes, it does have a washing machine. And no, it does not have drying facilities. So helpful. Needless to say, the first words out of Nick’s mouth more than adequately expressed the dismay we both felt - but then quickly turned to cursing Poland/Krakow/Polish people once more. Thank god for… (der ner ner nehhh ner nehhhhh) PUB LAUNDRY! That’s not it’s name, but it should be. It’s a place that has more washing machines and dryers than you can poke a stick at, a bar, and a café-kind-of (no food) atmosphere. And friendly staff. Which really matters when you’re trying your excruciating Polish on them (well, how else will we learn!), and they do speak English. It was bliss. And we got a bit day-time-pisshkey waiting for the clothes to wash and dry, and we were sooooo much happier. We also met a couple of aussie chicks (who had met the day before at the hostel and were also getting their stuff cleaned), who we went out with that night to a couple of places in the ’Old Jewish Quarter’ with a guy they’d met who’d escaped the Brethren cult (interesting stories there) and was doing 28 European countries in an incredibly (so I think) short time. The next day,the wryly coolest of the bunch Candyce, a lovely Melbourne chick with whom Nick and I had a lot in common in music taste and general attitudes, came with us to Auschwitz, when we drove.
Walking through Market Square after Pub Laundry. Nick’s first smile after we entered Poland, I think. I was worrying he might turn into a Pole (they’re quite impassively faced people who look like they’ve had a hard life - but they probably have).

Afternoon snack to make sure we made it to our dinner meet that night (after pub laundry). LOVE cart food. And since Nick and I only really understood 1/3 of what the lady said… and there was a queue, Nick said yes to extra sausage (unwittingly - but it was yum as).

Auschwitz - serious bit of blog. Please don't read if you don't want to

The reason we’d actually chosen Krakow was that it was the closest major town to Auschwitz. So that was the destination the next day, with our cool new friend Candyce, plus Klaus (a positive obviously), Polish roads (negative), and a GPS that thinks you can drive through pedestrian areas (a little bit of column a,and a little bit of column b) . We had it on ’fastest route’… As we drove, we passed a roundabout with a sign to Oswiecim (Polish village, Germans took the name for the infamous camp)… and took a different turn, on the GPS’ instructions. Not a great sign of things to come. Neither was the roads getting progressively smaller and smaller, and windier and windier. ’Surely Auschwitz would be signed!’ Yeah, the way without the tiny ferry on the dirt road WAS signed. What’s that you say? Yup, the GPS took us down a dirt road to a queue of a dozen smiley locals waiting for a one-car ferry (DODGEY-looking one-car ferry) to take them across the creek/river thing over to the other bit of pitted dirt road. It was a boat thing, attached to an elevated cable positioned upstream. We weren’t sure Avis (or our Mums) would approve, so it was backkkktrackkkk to the nearest tiny village and ask for directions in broken polish. Some things are beyond words and the lady managed to convey that if we went back and turned left, we’d pretty much go straight there. We also reprogrammed the GPS to avoid ferries (who knew that wouldn’t be a default? Although there‘s ferries,and then there‘s Polish ferries, clearly, just like ‘roads‘ and ‘polish roads‘) and were stoked when it agreed with the lady.

Auschwitz…

Words can’t describe the horrors of those camps. We had the best guide, who spoke fantastic English, had done it for 12 years and you can tell took his job - conveying that horror as much as possible, but affording those poor people the dignity and respect they were denied in life - so seriously. It would be disrespectful to linger on every macabre detail here (and you can look the facts/figures up yourself), so I’ll give a summary of the things that really struck/moved all 3 of us.

1) It was a beautiful sunny day when we visited, and that seemed really wrong to us, in the face of what we heard and saw that day.

2) The disgusting calculated-ness of:

I) the positioning of the camp (pretty much the middle of Europe, very convenient for transporting people from all of the German occupied areas);

II) Making the decision that children were no use, most women were no use (especially if you took their children), the sick or disabled and old men were also no use and therefore all of those people were led directly to the gas chambers upon arrival (after the Auschwitz and Birkenau started being death cams as well as ’concentration’ camps’;

III) shaving the killed women’s hair to take it to make cloth/stockings etc (taken from their dead bodies), taking gold teeth and jewellery from the dead;

3) The inhuman and deliberate sanctioned/ordered acts of the guards to strip the poor people living in the camps of their dignity, and then inevitably kill them in one way or another, through the impossibly hard work on no rations, disease, beatings, horrible punishments - and random selections just to torture the people, shootings and gas chambers.

4) That through underground information sources the allied forces knew of the concentration camp/s almost as soon as they began, and then they knew (almost directly after) that they had begun killing people (mostly Jews) in the gas chambers from September 1942. It was a long time to the end of the war.

More people were interned and more were killed at Birkenau than Auschwitz. The Nazis blew up the several gas chambers there when it appeared the war was lost for them, to attempt to hide the evidence, as well as dismantling the death walls (walls against which people were shot) at both camps. Auschwitz is the more complete camp, and I would very much recommend a visit to both. Auschwitz is the museumy bit which humanises for you the poor people who were brought there and mostly died there, and Birkenau emphasises the scale upon which it was done.

Auschwitz camp...

Stockpiled glasses of the victims of the gas chambers.
Suitcases - they made the people being taken to the camp write their names on them, even when most of those who arrived would be murdered immediately. All part of the ruse to keep them compliant.
Immense piles of shoes of the victims. Lots were shipped back to Germany and doled out to German citizens, but there were huge stockpiles still remaining when the allies took the camp.
There were rows of photos like this, showing date of arrival and date of death (Nazis recorded this info and took pictures of those they made do work - I.e. healthy men - lots of old men, the sick, and pretty much all women and children went straight to the gas chambers). We noticed of the pictures, that the later you arrived, the shorter you survived.

Birkenau - each of those chimneys was for a different building with people cramped in terrible conditions - they housed up to 1,000.

The ‘nicer’ quarters of Auschwitz. The Birkenau buildings were wooden (colder), and the bunks thinner - but the people were made to sleep 3 on one bunk - and without mattresses.
Recreation of ‘death wall’ at Auschwitz. The Nazis destroyed the original when they left.

Where, after the war crimes tribunal convicted him, they hung the head of the Auschwitz camps. He lived with his family in a house, not more than 50m from the gas chambers and cremation ovens at Auschwitz. That's where these gallows are - within sight.

The gas chamber at Auchwitz. The real deal. The guide said sometimes they killed so many in the one group, that the bodies had nowhere to fall after they died and so they were still standing when the ’criminals’ (also captives in the concentration camp, often Jews, who did the guards' dirty work in exchange for better conditions - including convincing the gas chamber victims that after their shower they'd get food, so to be quick to strip off and in getting into the 'shower') came to get the bodies, strip them of anything useful and take them to the cremation ovens.

Sorry if it seemed as if DID linger over details, when I said I wouldn’t. There’s a lot more to it, and the figures they give for people killed at the group of camps there is around 1.5 million, and I just think it’s important to remember/learn about so that nothing like that can ever be allowed to happen again.

OK, so, the next day, feeling very lucky to live in a safe country in a safe time for us we drove to Budapest. This involved 3 countries (I still count Poland), and 2 vignette (prepaid motorway passes) purchases. These being a lot harder transactions than you would expect, OK? We found this section of Poland’s roads… a bit better. And a bit newer. Though still… not great, and still dotted with slow cyclists (slow to the extent that the front wheel wobbles from lack of propulsion) and the inevitable shrines to Mary. Poor Poland (as I had come to say to interrupt Nick’s periodic rants on Poland/the Poles/Krakow/Flamingo Doubles). As we approached the border, we came to a strange roadside market/fair. It was just a random Tuesday morning, but there were thousands of people and hundreds of stalls, all selling… well, what we could call, ’weird’ things. Their version of garden gnomes, next to hats (on the same stall), animal pelts, unfamiliar foods… it was fantastic, and would have been great to explore and score some cheap mementos, but we faced the Slovakian roads with some trepidation (having learnt the hard way, from Poland) and so we scooted on.

Slovakia was a pleasant surprise. Roads were heaps better, although still quite slow (80km/hr for a lot of the way) because of trucks and because the roads were winding along valleys between huge, green mountains. Which are awesome snow fields (complete with chair lifts directly from town filled with chalets and hotels - MUST go back, it’s beautiful and would be cheap as) in winter. And check out what we saw when we turned a corner into a fresh valley in Slovakia…

Now THAT’S a castle. Or rather, a Hvar.

Next time = Hungary/Budapest, and Nick’s turn. As even I am sick of the sound of my own voice. Arghh! Why can’t I be brief? At least you can just look at the piccies if they look to daunting I guess.

Hugs,

L.