Krakow

This past weekend I packed up my backpack and hopped on a plane towards Krakow, Poland. The flights to and from were long and possibly unpleasant for a variety of reasons, most of which concern my larger-than-average height and my rather unpleasant disposition for ear and air-pressure conflicts. I'm still battling with the whole "oh my gosh my ear won't pop" situation.

So far my trips have been exciting, exhilarating, and much fun. I've visited places with such rich history of victory and success. London is the world's powerhouse, Amsterdam has museums and beautiful architecture galore, Prague is a symbolic city of the fall of fascism and planned economies and the success of democracy and market economies. Vienna is the manifestation of western culture through thought, architecture, theater, and music. Krakow is the palimpsest of the dark sides of human activity.

Granted, there are many great things about Krakow. It has a very beautiful town center: It's amazing that this is one of the few occupied areas to avoid destruction and one of the few places east of the Iron Curtain to survive that ghastly soviet-block-syndrome. However, the city has not been well maintained. Most of this has to do with the power of polish currency and the general lack of funds for infrastructure reinforcement and renewal. Some view the decaying, crumbling facades as charming and an essential part of the Krakow urban landscape. I think it's sad.

On my first full day there, I took a walking tour through Kazimierz, the former Jewish section of the city. It's really sad to think that the inhabitants who had filled this district with incredible cultural and material wealth with stunning buildings at the beginning of the 20th century were just forced out in 1941 to the Krakow Ghetto across the river. Walking through the ghetto was a mesh of thoughts and emotions - a quarter of me was thrilled to walk through a place with such contemporary vibe and vitality, the other three quarters of me was filled with anguish as I thought about the thousands of people crowded into that place, only to be quickly and bloodily liquidated through a series of deportations to various camps in the vicinity and left essentially vacant for a quarter of a century. Walking on sidewalks smeared with such gory history was indescribable.

The next day I took a trip out to Oświęcim, about 2 hours by bus from Krakow. The town is home to quite possibly one of the darkest remnants of human history, the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps. Upon first arrival, groups of tourists wielding cameras and hot dogs see Auschwitz I, a former Polish army base, filter underneath the infamous "Arbeit macht Frei" gate, stopping to take pictures with little 7-year old Susie and 14-year old Bob for Grandma. I was really disappointed at the way the original camp was remodeled, filled with mostly irrelevant museum displays and given a gift shop. Very few areas were left sacred, and even those areas were trampled by groups with a loud tour guide holding a bright-colored cloth on a stick above his/her head. The experience was disturbing, and not for the right reasons.

Apparently, few visitors take the trek out to Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This is the place that has quite possibly had the most impact of any place I've been in my entire lifetime. The camp is situated outside of the city. As one takes the bus from the first camp (surrounded today by city), one passes the green countryside, only to feel his stomach drop as he encounters the most pungent symbol of the Holocaust, the entrance to the Birkenau camp. This place left an impression. It was one of the most sobering experiences of my life. Nobody had to talk, placards in 5 different languages were not necessary. The place spoke for itself.

As the SS retreated at the end of the war, they destroyed the gas chambers and many of the barracks. Many were spared, probably due to time constraint imposed by the advancing Soviets. The camp was not rebuilt and refurbished. It was left alone. The grass grew wild, the rubble remained rubble, and the remaining buildings sat as silent memorials to the unbelievable atrocities to human beings that occurred there. As I walked from barrack to barrack, I couldn't wrap my mind around the reality staring me in the face. No textbook, no lecture, no memoir can explain the complex mixture of feelings of anger, sadness, disappointment, disgust, and nausea that whirl through you as you silently pass from place to place. The expanse of foundations and wall rubble remain visible today. One can see the room divisions and even the drains in the floor. The crematorium apparatuses are still recognizable. The sorting room where prisoners were counted, shaved, tattooed, and dehumanized still bore the room labeling. Phrases such as "Sauberkeit ist Gesundheit (cleanliness is healthiness)" and "Reden ist silber, Schweigen ist Gold (talking is silver, silence is gold) Walking through it was very intense.

It was an experience that everybody should experience. It was incredibly humbling to walk amongst the ruins of such blind hatred. The experience really grounded me and placed a concrete image to hundreds of pages of abstract description. The thought of such acts upon a human being being committed by another human being on that scale and with such organization really causes one to question himself. This was done to real people by real people. It could happen to you, it could happen to me. A memorial like this should hopefully make sure that it is never done by you or by me.