Big Adventures, Little World

Our last full day in Poland we planned on going to the site of Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp/Museum that was in operation by the Nazis before and during World War II. We were heading off to the bus station when we were approached by someone offering to take us there, wait there with us, take us to the second Auschwitz site, and then bring us back again. Now it seems kind of dodgy, and the whole time Kate was wondering if she was going to get murdered, but it was all fine and worked out to be a good deal for us. Having previously visited Mauthausen Concentration Camp in Austria I had an idea of what to expect, but Auschwitz is so very different. The sheer size of it and the ground that it covered was enormous. It was connected to the railway system so they could bring the prisoners in by trains straight into the camp. From the entrance to the end of the train track was about a kilometre, and because of the fog we could barely see down to the end of the tracks. This made for an eerie experience, even more so by the time we were leaving when the fog had got lower and thicker, and we could only see at most a couple of hundred metres in front of us. We didn’t cover the entire grounds even though we spent a good 4 hours there. It really is something that needs to be experienced yourself and to spend quite a bit of time there to take it all in and understand what happened during these times. If for no other reason so that as many people as possible know so that something like this is never allowed to happen again.

The rest of our stay was quite uneventful. We went out for dinner again after our visit to Auschwitz, where we all had Zur and pierogi where afterwards we headed back to the hotel and had a few drinks and got most of our packing done to leave early the next morning. Elese and I were up early to get to Krakow airport, while the others had to catch the train back to Warsaw and fly from there later in the afternoon. It was good leaving early in the morning as it meant we made it back to London, and therefore back home at a normal hour during the day where we pretty much just lay down, exhausted, with nothing but sleep on our minds.