A Ginger Perspective : May 2013

We spent the weekend in Poland and it was beyond incredible. I feel like I've found an unexpected treasure in Poland. It was so gorgeous and not like what I was expecting at all. We left Thursday night after teaching and arrived in Krakow on Friday evening. It was a long day of traveling, from bus to taxi to train to taxi again... I was glad when we finally made it to the hostel and I could relieve my shoulders from the weight of my backpack. We spent Friday and Saturday night exploring Krakow and all of its wonders. I love Europe! There is no way I can even describe this city to you and the pictures do not do it justice.Seriously the cobblestone roads, old churches, romantic European couples, street vendors, centuries-old buildings.... LOVE LOVE LOVE! Oh and the group I get the privilege of traveling with... LOVE them too!

All packed and ready to go to Poland!

At the train station in Warsaw

We took a train from Warsaw to Krakow... We felt like we were headed to Hogwarts.

Krakow!!!

Kebabs! Poland has the most delicious Kebabs... I could eat these all the time and they're massive!

Polish yolo? Perhaps

Ice-cream and cupcakes at a fun bakery

LOVE my group!

I'm skipping ahead a little bit to Sunday where we spent the day in Warsaw, Poland's capital. Another beautiful city. Most of the city was destroyed during the years of WWII but the rebuilt Old Town is absolutely gorgeous.

Writing some postcards on the train to Warsaw

Love the street vendors!

Can you say gorgeous?!

Too delicious for words...

The biggest bubbles I have ever seen!

Now we can rewind a little bit. Saturday we hopped on a bus and headed to Auschwitz. Wow... what an experience. I don't even know how to describe it. It was so heart-wrenching and overwhelming to the point where my brain couldn't even comprehend it all. The extent of the memorial is massive. We spent eight hours walking around everywhere and even though I was physically, mentally, and emotionally exhausted by the end there is still so much that I didn't get to see. The museum they have set up is in the first part of the concentration camp, Auschwitz I. To quote the memorial's website, "Auschwitz I is where the Nazis opened the first Auschwitz camps for men and women, where they carried out the first experiments at using Zyklon B to put people to death, where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, where they conducted the first criminal experiments on prisoners, where they carried out most of the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp commandant's office and most of the SS offices were located. From here, the camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex."

Building after building is filled with exhibits, memorials, pictures, stories... every detail adding to the horrific reality of the Holocaust.

Execution block

One of the many exhibits at the museum. This room is filled on both sides with over 40,000 pairs of shoes taken from the entering Jews...not even a large fraction of the amount of people that were actually here.

The second part is Auschwitz II- Birkenau and again quoting the website, "Birkenau is where the Nazis erected most of the machinery of mass extermination in which they murdered approximately one million European Jews. At the same time, Birkenau was the largest concentration camp (with nearly 300 primitive barracks, most of them wooden). Over a hundred thousand prisoners were here in 1944: Jews, Poles, Roma, and others. The nearly 200 hectares of grounds include the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria and places filled with human ashes."

I've spent years in and out of school studying this tragedy and yet nothing compares to actually being there, standing where they stood. This was the hardest part for me. The pictures in no way show the extent of this part of the memorial. Nothing really could unless you're there to see for yourself. Indescribable... truly.