(no subject)
I went to Auschwitz today. It was.... really heavy. I bought an english tour because I had to, being as I went during peak hours, but I'm kind of glad I did. I got way more information that way. I'm not going to write about it much, it was really depressing. We went through some of the buildings in Auschwitz. They had some photos, and some paintings, and they had some exhibits of some of the belongings of the prisoners that they found. I learned something today though. The warehouses where the goods from the dead prisoners were kept, where all the stuff from the suitcases and bags that the Jews were told to bring to their "new lives in Poland" were called "Canada". They had Canada I and Canada II in Auschwitz, because Canada was supposed to be this paradise far away from Poland, so they called the warehouses full of the treasures of dead Jews Canada. I thought that was kind of sick. We went into a recreation of the Auschwitz crematorium, where they would have burned the bodies after the gas chambers. We also saw several torture cells. We saw starvation cells, which are pretty self explanitory. We saw "darkness cells", or suffocation cells, where they used to cram as many people as would literally fit in them, and they only had a tiny little window, which was partially blocked from the outside, to breath through. Sometimes people died of the suffocation. Then there were the standing cells, which were.... I dunno..... three feet by three feet maybe. You had to get into them by crawling through a tiny door at the bottem, and they would put four men in these cells overnight, where they couldn't move at all. Then in the morning, they would take them out and they would have to go and work for a full 11-12 hour torturous work day, then come back and go back in the cell overnight.
After Auschwitz 1, we went to Birkenau, about three km up the road. Birkenau is much bigger, and was actually built by the prisoners. It was actually still under construction right up until the germans had to evacuate it. They had the really big crematoriums, but the Germans blew them up right before they left, so all that is left is ruins. It was weird, the first thing I thought when I passed through the gates into Birkenau is that it was very beautiful, in a quiet and sad kind of way. We saw the memorial that was built next to the crematorium, and we got walked through the stables where they kept the prisoners. I saw stables quite literally too, because the buildings were built on the same design as stables built to fit 52 horses. They fit quite a lot more humans.
I would have actually liked to have stayed in Birkenau for a while after the tour was done, and write or just meditate in the field among the ruins, but the last bus back to Krakow left less than an hour after my tour, so that was my day.
After Auschwitz 1, we went to Birkenau, about three km up the road. Birkenau is much bigger, and was actually built by the prisoners. It was actually still under construction right up until the germans had to evacuate it. They had the really big crematoriums, but the Germans blew them up right before they left, so all that is left is ruins. It was weird, the first thing I thought when I passed through the gates into Birkenau is that it was very beautiful, in a quiet and sad kind of way. We saw the memorial that was built next to the crematorium, and we got walked through the stables where they kept the prisoners. I saw stables quite literally too, because the buildings were built on the same design as stables built to fit 52 horses. They fit quite a lot more humans.
I would have actually liked to have stayed in Birkenau for a while after the tour was done, and write or just meditate in the field among the ruins, but the last bus back to Krakow left less than an hour after my tour, so that was my day.