Wroclaw, Auschwitz and Birkenau

The last couple of days have been a bit lazy. We stayed in a castle where we had a dumpling making workshop and a pretty good meal that featured dumplings. We visited a pottery and did a tour of it and also participated in a workshop where bowls were painted up ready for firing in an oven. All very touristy and relaxed.

Painstaking concentration

More concentration

 We arrived in Wroclaw on Friday evening and took a two hour walking tour with a local guide. It was a great walk with some wonderful river views and excellent commentary and stories from our guide. Wroclaw is known for the brass gnomes that can be sighted all around town. There were only about 8 of them in the 1980's but their population has increased tenfold since then.

Wroclaw River view

One of the Gnomes of Wroclaw

There is a great story too of how the Bishop of Wroclaw collaborated with the Solidarity Party to rescue and harbour their millions from the Communist Bank back in the 80's. He not only retrieved the cash but bought U.S currency with it thus increasing their wealth substantially.

Twilight in the Wroclaw Square

Our tour concluded not long after arriving at one of the most wonderful town squares that you could ever imagine. Again, reconstructed after the war, this large, colourful and vibrant square has left us with wonderful memories of our visit.

More Gnomes

This morning in cool and damp weather we travelled for about three hours on the journey from Wroclaw to Auschwitz. A McDonald’s coffee and toilet break about 2/3rds of the way there gave us the final hour to watch an Auschwitz documentary on the bus. It was fairly confronting and put everyone in a fairly sombre mood in preparation for the afternoon tour of two concentration camps that we certainly wanted to visit but were doing so with a lot of apprehension and anxiety.

From the carpark, the building we first came to could have been an entrance to any tourist attraction you could name. A zoo, a museum or even a theme park. The long hip and gable roof with a dozen dormer windows and a turnstile at one end of the dark red brick building gave no indication of what we would be confronted with once we entered.

Auschwitz Concentration Camp

There were about 25 in the Tour we joined and had an English guide and a very good headphone and receiver system to ensure we missed none of the commentary. Just through a small courtyard we passed under the wrought iron overhead arch clearly indicating that we were entering Auschwitz and dozens of two story dormitories stood in front of us.

The first couple we visited portrayed both through the layout of the buildings and also the photos that were displayed just how brutal this place had been some 75 years ago. The more we visited the more depressing it all became. I'm not going to say too much more about it and I'll be a bit selective about photos too. It's hard enough just writing this through teary eyes.

We walked through huge rooms with massive displays of thousands of pairs of shoes, suitcases and other personal items and literally thousands of kilos of human hair before concluding the tour by walking through one of the surviving gas chambers and crematoriums.

The end of the Auschwitz tour had us on a shuttle bus to the next visit only five minutes away at the Birkenou camp. This one was a lot more open air and not nearly as confronting as Auschwitz. The main entrance and rail line have survived and many of the brick dormitories still stand as they did in Wartime. The entire camp is surrounded by kilometres of electric barbed perimeter fencing and watch towers and in certain directions you only see the chimneys and foundation ruins of hundreds of timber dormitories that have been long demolished. Also in ruins are the gas chambers that killed 1.3 million Jews and other prisoners. This camp at Birkenou accommodated 100,000 prisoners who worked in the nearby coal mine and local fields.

The train line into Birkenou

We complain about sitting in economy for 23 hours to get to Europe. These poor souls shared a carriage with 80 others for up to a week and if unfit to work they were destined for the gas chamber.

The massive dormitories of Birkenou.

Acres of Chimneys where timber dormitories once stood.

We've now arrived in Kraków and everyone is quite excited about settling in here now for the next four nights. We have a walking tour on Sunday and day tours organised for the next few days so we'll try and keep up with the blogging. 
Cheers again.