"Work Makes You Free" #9

(Field Trip #3)

My weekend in Krakow, Poland is one that I will never forget. I learned that Polish culture doesn't involve being very polite, that there are beautiful castles in Poland and more than I could have ever imagined learning about the Holocaust.

The city center of Krakow

We started the day on Friday morning by driving to Krakow and then spent the afternoon in the Salt Mines right outside of Krakow. It was amazing to see entire caves and sculptures made entirely out of salt! A few people even licked the walls but that just would have put a bad taste in my mouth ;). We walked down six flights of stairs before reaching the bottom. I never would have thought that salt mines would be so cool until I went in one. I was pleasantly surprised by how much fun we had.

One of the scultures made of salt in the mines

The next morning we all got up early and walked to one of Krakow's castles. I really like going through castles because it reminds me of the movie Princess Diaries. Then we went to the treasury and armory to see crowned jewels and armor and swords. I like looking at the jewels, but the armor really doesn't interest me that much anymore and all of it is starting to run together. After that, a few of us went with Jan to Oskar Schindler's factory. This was a museum set up in chronological order from when Krakow got taken over by the Nazi's and throughout World War ll. This was a very interactive museum that showed what it was like to be a citizen and Krakow and then a Jew. There were so many disturbing things that went along with this museum, but it did prepare us thoroughly for our next day when we visited Auschwitz concentration camp.

One of the blocks that 700 people lived in

The urn memorial

Pictures of some of the prisoners

This is the trip that I have been looking forward to and dreading at the same time. Immediately when we drove up, the energy shifted and there was a seriousness that came over all of us. There were so many things going through my head the whole time that it was hard to stay focused and remember where I was.  Trying to understand the pain that the 1.2 million people who died there went through was not easy.  The whole time I was thinking about how they came here to die and almost none of them had any idea what the overall plan was and why they were being sent there. They were walking on the same soil as me to their death. First, we went through the museum and the part of the camp that housed a lot of the prisoners. There was a memorial in the first building that held ashes of some of the victims of the Holocaust. We noticed that it was rather small and there is no way that 1.2 million people's ashes were in there and we found out that the majority of the ashes were located in a pond outside of one of the gas chambers. We went through a few buildings where the prisoners lived and I would say that it is smaller than the house I grew up in with four people and a dog. The tour guide said that in this building held 700 people at a time and we got to see a room set up like the ones that were originally in there. It was either 10-12 three story bunk beds or piles of hay to sleep on. And on each of the beds slept four men. In a few exhibits there were items taken from the prisoners upon arrival and saved. The numbers of the items were astonishing and seeing the number of people's belongings put it into a perspective that not many people think about. All of a sudden the number of people go from a million into each individual person who had a life there. The shoes, glasses, and suitcases that were all stacked into piles that no one could count made the number so much larger in my eyes. The pile of things that made me the most emotional however, were the prosthetic legs, crutches, back braces and walkers. Being a special education major, I have known a few people using these items. Although I will never truly understand what it means to have a physical disability, I do know that from what I have seen from an outside perspective, it is not easy. For example, if someone loses a limb and then gets a prosthetic, the process is huge. Getting from physical therapy, to trying different types of prosthetic, to getting used to it after months and years of pain and then finally being able to use both limbs again is a process no one should have to go through. Although it is hard, it is so rewarding to work so hard to have a close to normal life again. Seeing those was so hard because someone worked so hard, just to have it ripped from their lives and immediately killed. Another thing that was incredibly hard to see was the two tons of human hair behind glass. When the women got to the camp, they were shaven just like the men and they took all of the hair and shipped it off to places in Germany to have their hair made into textiles and linens. It was unbelievable that there was so much and that wasn't even half of what they had. Plus for most women, hair is a safety blanket in a sense and it makes us feel attractive. Being venerable in a place like that without hair is unimaginable.

Part of the giant stack of 80,000 shoes- not even a 10th of the amount of people killed

Prosthetics, braces and crutches

The prisoners glasses

There was so much to see there and so much history that filled the halls of the buildings and streets of the camp that it was hard to keep up. We went into the only gas chamber that was still standing in Auschwitz. Going in and seeing where thousands of people were killed at a time was overwhelming. Considering that a group of 30 of us took up a substantial amount of room in the big open room with no windows except for the ones at the top where the gas was poured in, it was not somewhere anyone would want to be. If you looked closely at the walls there were scratch marks from the people trying to escape the painful death that the Nazis put them through. They said that it took 20 minutes for two thousand people to be killed.

The Gas Chamber

After we saw that, we went a little bit up the road to the main extermination center called Birkenau. The buildings that the prisoners stayed in at this area were originally used as horse stables and were barely changed at all for the people staying there. The living conditions were awful and it was hard to listen to the tour guide explain what they went through every day. He was also describing some of the jobs that the camp made the prisoners do. One of them was a latrine cleaner that basically cleaned the excrements of 3000 people twice a day. He was explaining though that it was the best job to have because it was inside for the cold weather, the soldiers never went in their due to the smell, and the workers had unlimited bathroom use while the other prisoners only had 30 seconds twice a day. Then he took us up the hill a ways to the remains of the gas chambers that 1.2 million people were killed in and then cremated. To think of all of the lives that were lost in just one of those buildings was unfathomable and I have never thought that this evidence of this horrible genocide would be right in front of my face.

The toilets for the prisoners

The stables where the prisoners stayed

The remains of one of the gas chambers

After learning about it in history classes that started in fifth grade, I thought that I would be prepared for what I was about to see. I was completely wrong. I also knew I would be different after seeing this, but I did not know how shocked I would be at what I thought I knew all about. I knew nothing and seeing it in real life clicked in my head how important it is for everyone who can to see this in person and to realize what happened to so many people so quickly.