POLAND PART 2

Upon leaving Poland I had been thinking I would be able to cover our Polish adventures in one single post. As you can see from the previous post about Warsaw, it was a little more involved than that.... So this is part two for Poland covering Krakow & Auschwitz.

Initially we chose Krakow primarily as a departure point to Auschwitz & the Wieliczka Salt Mine. But Krakow itself is a lovely town with, like the rest of Poland, a very chequered past. But unlike Warsaw, Krakow escaped relatively unscathed after WWII so it is still more or less in its original condition.

We arrived in Krakow in the afternoon and en route to our accommodation we had to pass through the old town. The old town centres around the main market square which dates back to the 13th century and is the largest medieval town square in Europe. It is dominated in the centre by the 16th century Sukiennice building (cloth hall or draper's hall in English) which today houses the principle market activities.

The Main Market Square at dusk

The perimeter of the square is dotted with cafes, restaurants and pubs, so it was here that we had our first aperitifs in Krakow.

Two walking tours were on the agenda for the following day. The first tour took us around the Jewish quarter and the former Jewish ghetto. This tour had a bit of a slant around the Schindler's List film because Krakow was the town where the Oscar Schindler story actually took place during the war. It was also where the movie was filmed so Schindler's List themes tend to feature in quite a bit of the tourist info and activities. The tour ended at the site of Oscar Schindler's factory - now an art gallery and a museum. 

The Fiat 500 - the most popular car in Poland during communism. They were actually built in Poland throughout the communist era and many are still around today. This one's seen better days...

A memorial at the former Jewish ghetto. There are 65 chairs in the memorial, one for each 1,000 Krakovian Jews murdered during the Holocaust..

A modern art installation. The cut-outs on the top of the tunnel show up on the side wall and simply name the two most visited sites around Krakow - Auschwitz & Wieliczka

The second tour was a walk around the old town covering some of the broader pre WWII historical sites and stories. It finished at Wawel Castle and Cathedral.

University courtyard

Another Chopin monument and yet another fountain that's not working when Adrian is there...

In the courtyard of the Wawel Castle

Wawel Castle

The main tourist centre / town hall - an interesting modern building

This guy gets a bit of a mention around these parts...Pope John Paul II was born and raised in Krakow. He lived in this house between 1951 - 1967

And here he is again... He seems to appear around every corner...

Day two was dedicated to a tour of Auschwitz and the Wieliczka Salt Mine. We were initially planning to allocate a day to each of these places but we found an operator who guaranteed that we could do both in one day. It was not a bus tour or really an organised tour per se but a car and a driver. Slawek picked us up from our accommodation at 9:00am and we headed straight for Auschwitz, which is about 1.5hrs from Krakow. He showed us into the reception area of the museum and got us sorted with a guided tour of the camp, etc and then waited for us in the carpark until we were finished.

Auschwitz will probably go down as the most memorable part of our entire European adventure. Judging by the number of people there in the off-peak period when we were there it is obviously one of the most visited tourist destinations in Krakow, if not Poland (but don't quote me on that!). Apparently it attracts some 1.3 million visitors per year. Despite this it did not feel like a major tourist attraction. 

First up we were shown a short documentary film about the 1945 liberation of the camp and afterwards organised into groups of about 30 for a guided tour - it is only possible to visit the camp as part of a guided tour. The demeanour and professionalism of our guide was outstanding and only added to the experience. He was passionate about the subject and was not just going through the motions, which you often find with tour guides. He was always aware of other tour groups and always made sure we never imposed on them and vice versa. We had head sets to hear him so he didn't have to yell which meant he could give the commentary the reverence appropriate to the location.

We were lead through the famous main gate with the words "arbeit macht frei", meaning "work sets you free" which must be one of the greatest oxymorons of all time; most deaths in Auschwitz, contrary to popular belief, were a direct consequence of overwork and malnutrition. Whilst all of the buildings are original they have reconfigured them into a museum which presents all of the essential elements of the holocaust story from the transportation of the prisoners, through the selection process, life in the camps, the Gestapo "trials" and executions, medical experiments, the eventual development of the gas chambers and the resulting industrialised mass murder which occurred towards the end of the war.

The execution wall - this is where prisoners were shot by the Gestapo

As the sign says, this is where the first commandant of Auschwitz was hanged in 1947 after the War Tribunal. When he was commandant of the camp he lived, with his wife & children, approximately 200m to the right of this picture! 

The first "trial" gas chamber and crematorium

The most poignant part of the tour and one which drove home the scale of the horror was a series of exhibits with various items the Nazis collected from the prisoners / victims - thousands & thousands of shoes, eye glasses, baby clothes, gold teeth & dentures, suitcases, artificial limbs and even mounds of human hair. Even now, when writing this and thinking about it, it still brings a tear to the eye.

The tour of the main Auschwitz camp took about three hours but was only the first of two parts, the second being the Birkenau camp. So we went to wake up Slawek our driver for the 5 minute drive to Birkenau. Birkenau was in fact the "death-camp" part of Auschwitz and the location of the large scale gas chambers. It is from here that most of the common imagery originates - the brick entrance gate & building, the railway and the rows upon rows of timber huts, etc.

Communal toilets. Prisoners were only allowed to use these twice a day

Not many of the timber huts are still standing but each chimney stack represents one former hut. Each hut housed up to 400 prisoners

The sleeping arrangements inside the huts - three people per tier / bed

The transport carriages could carry as many as 80-90 people

The Nazis demolished the gas chambers as they abandoned the camps. This is all that is left of them

We spent another 90 minutes or so there  whereupon we went back out to the carpark to wake up Slawek again for the 1.5hr drive back towards Krakow & the salt mines. He managed to get us there in time for the last tour of the day at 5pm despite some major traffic issues which, with his local knowledge and a few phone calls to his boss, he worked his way around. Again he showed us in to the museum entry and got us sorted with a tour and he went back to waiting in the car.

The Wieliczka Salt Mine continuously produced table salt from the 13th century until 2007 as one of the world's oldest operating salt mines. Yep - they were mining salt from here long before Australia was even a twinkle in Captain Cook's eye! Commercial mining was discontinued in 1996 due to low salt prices and mine flooding. Nowadays it is maintained as a tourist attraction and it received approx 1.2 million visitors per year. Today the mine's attractions for tourists include dozens of statues and an entire chapel that has been carved out of the rock salt by the miners.

A complete "cathedral" was built in the mines. Everything in here is made of salt, even the crystals on the chandeliers

Statues carved out of salt

The tour starts with a descent of approx 380 steps to reach 64m below ground. from there tour continues down sloping corridors and more steps to a maximum depth of 135m below ground. Luckily there is a lift to get back to the surface.

We must say that it was interesting and worth the visit but it's just a little too touristy and feels a little like a fun park than a real salt mine. Our experience probably wasn't helped by the fact that we were in the middle of a large group of Asian tourists with a really obnoxious tour leader who kept barging his way through and around us the whole time. There is a reason we avoid large bus tour operators...

It was well after dark by the time we returned to the surface and poor old Slawek was still waiting for us in the carpark. So we woke him up again for the short drive back to our accommodation where we kicked our feet up for the evening. On the way Slawek even stopped in at a supermarket for us so we could get some supplies for dinner that evening.  A great service and worthy of a recommendation http://www.krakowdiscovery.com/

We had one last day in Krakow but we specifically had no tourist activities on the agenda - we needed a rest. It was spent wandering the shops, organising train tickets to Prague and accommodation in Prague, writing some updates to this blog and so forth. So there's nothing really to report about our last day there except to note that Adrian got a new pair of trakky-daks...