A side trip to Poland

The main gate to the "Museum"

As we planned the European trip my co-pilot said to me, "If we are going to Prague don't think we aren't going to "Auschwitz!" She obviously had realised that the Camp was only a five hour drive from Prague. So booking a car on-line and arranging a B&B in the village it was done - a two day side trip to Poland. 

We picked up the car first thing Monday morning and we were on our way after about thirty minutes of paperwork, waiting and inspection. The route had been well spec'd out with various mapping programmes and an app had been installed on the phone - thank you Sygic. It performed well. The big surprise seen motoring down the freeway was the number of 'enroutes'; roadside service stations, many of them hosting the usual multinational franchises - McD, KFC, BurgerKing. We used a Mickey Ds to get a reliable cup of coffee after three hours on the road. 

After five and a half hours on the motorway Sygic led us to Oswiecim, the village that is the home of the Camps. Auschwitz actually consists of two Camps, the smaller camp of Auschwitz, which everybody refers to as the "Museum" and the larger of the two - Birkenau. Getting settled in at the B&B the receptionist gave us a map and said that the Museum was only a ten minute walk. It was and getting free tickets with a time stamp of 4pm - another thirty-five minutes to go, it was suggested we visit Birkenau first and then come back at about five. 

Birkenau - a vast place

A free shuttle took us over, a ten minute ride, but finding the bus took that long, no signposts. Birkenau is HUGE, and seeing it all took an hour of walking but we did see it all. There are many camps, the first was built in brick and the rest were wooden and the camps were built in sequence to accomodate the growing number of Societies that the Nazis had decided to eliminate. Consequently most of the wooden camp side is now foundation but a few huts have been reconstructed. The main screening building - one of the larger buildings is still intact and a walkthrough can put you in the shoes of the unfortunates who came here.

The ruins of the crematoria

Finally at the end of the camp the ruins of the crematoria - II and III can be seen. As the Allies approached the Camp the SS guards blew up the buildings and the ruins are still there, next to the International Memorial to the Victims of Fascism.

The railroad tracks - "The Ramp"

Walking back to the bus and the Main Entrance one has to walk past the railway tracks - all three of them - where the prisoners would be unloaded and selection for immediate death or prison took place. The vastness of the place, the Camps, cannot be imagined until one sees it, and it is hard to imagine 100,000 prisoners in the place in the dead of winter! 

 So back at the Museum we entered, after being screened for metal, into the smaller camp of Auschwitz, the camp has been maintained as a complete complex but not all the buildings are open to the public.

This room, one of three in the building housed 
200 prisoners, that slept on straw mattresses.

The buildings that were open, contained exhibits showing various aspects of camp conditions. The most gruesome were in the basement of the building that housed the Justice Section where prisoners, mostly political prisoners of the Gestapo, were housed before summary trial and execution by firing squad.
Again it is hard to imagine the fact that seven hundred people would be caged in the buildings, but it happened. 

A pic of the ovens taken from Wikipedia

The gas chamber, the room on the left
housed the ovens.

The original gas chambers and crematoria have been reconstructed as a monument to the fact, but on seeing them one was impressed by just how small the facilities were, to kill as many people as they did the ovens definitely had to work around the clock. Leaving the place in a sombre mood we both had only one thought, get some food and relax. 

The meal that night was not very good, in fact the worst of the trip. An early night in a very nice B&B made up for the five hour drive and an excursion to two death camps! On the road again we decided to return to Prague on smaller roads, we had been on the motorway all the way to Oswiecim. Travelling through the countryside we could see more. The GPS app - Sygic - performed admirably and as a data package had been purchased before leaving Canada the mistakes we made, missing a critical ramp twice, were immediately rectified, yep this app was worth the money. Filling the fuel tank twice the price of fuel in the Czech Republic was more expensive - about $1.50cdn a litre, but the car used less of it. 

Back in Prague for the last night, both of us whacked out, all we could do was to cross the road and get a meal. Refreshed and ready to go for the next day; we checked out, jumped into the waiting airport taxi, 21 euros to the airport and entered the most expensive airport we have been in so far. Remember the the exchange rate ripoff I wrote about before, well it got worse in the airport; coffee shop. Two coffees and a bottle of water should have been 12 euros we were charged 16. One thing we were glad we did when we had the chance - paid a little extra for 'upfront' seating, that gave us speedy boarding and extra baggage allowance - a good deal for not much extra cost. Landing back in Amsterdam, no free shuttle this time, a taxi was needed to go the last hotel of the trip.