After 7 sleepless, sweaty hours on the frontmost seat of a bus, under which the bus' radiator was housed, my companions and I toured Auschwitz and Auschwitz II-Birkenau death camps.
Visiting the camps was my primary incentive for signing up for the optional trip to Krakow, Poland. I realize how historically paradoxical (can you tell I read a Chuck Klosterman book this week? I think he uses a form of the word paradox 150 times in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, which I recommend, but not as much as I recommend Chuck Klosterman IV--anyway, back to not being a snob who reads) that incentive is, but even so, I'm very glad to have seen both.
And just as an aside, if anyone from CIEE Prague is reading this (God I hope not), consider this my formal recommendation to hire the lady who organized the Krakow trip (her name has since escaped me) to organize everything you ever need organized ever again. She makes traveling to arguably the saddest place on earth a manageable process. You make me want to lock myself in my dorm room and blog about how inefficient you all are.
[What's the opposite/complement to an aside?] So, Auschwitz. Not a whole lot else can be said but that the tour was really profound and really sad. To give you an idea of the experience, here are three specific memories:
1) No one asked a single question. (Technically not true. Approximately 1.5 hours into the tour, soonafter we arrived at Birkenau -- Auschwitz and Bikenau are almost 2 miles apart -- I asked if anything was being restored for preservation. The answer was yes, some of the wood. But that was the lone question, so you get the idea. Whole lotta thinkin', not much talkin'.)
2) Our tourguide told us that prisoners actually preferred the job of manually cleaning out the camp-wide toilets to any other job at the camp because the guards wouldn't come near their feces-covered bodies.
3) Not technically a memory, but a video I took from the dead center of Birkenau -- in roughly the same spot where prisoners deboarded and were selected to either be murdered immediately or worked to death.
My camera battery died shortly after this, which was great timing.
Just in case anyone wants to feel a little worse about the world (or better about its present, depending on how you look at it), below are some more pictures:
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| Work makes freedom. |
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| What remains of an incineration house at Birkenau |
Marty
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