Auschwitz / Birkenau

Monday last week, I visited one of the most infamous places on Earth: the nazis' exterminations camps of Auschwitz, near Krakow. I considered not visiting them for a long time, but finally decided to go. This place is a sad place but it is worth visiting it. We should not forget the past... The sad thing is there are still stupids following those shitty ideas...

Auschwitz was composed of 4 different camps. Two of them were preserved after the Soviet army entered Poland and Germany: Auschwitz I and the nearby Birkenau. These two places are UNESCO World Heritage.

Auschwitz I was the original extermination camp and it is not very large in size. Buildings are also quite close to each other and there is still one of the crematories and gas chambers in site. Many of the buildings are a museum now. Some buildings are horrifying... There is one with all the goods belonging to Jewish people brought there. Thousands of shoes, suitcases and any item you can imaging. However, the most horrible view is a room where the hair of the corpses was and is kept. Nazis used hair from corpses in gas chamber for the fabrication of many goods. That image was hard to take...

At the entrance of the camp you find this motto: Arbeit Macht Frei -- Work makes you free... No comments...



For the rest of the photos, I will omit any comments judge by yourself.






Birkenau is very different. It was designed when nazis decided to exterminate the Jewish race from Earth. For that reason, it is huge. Up to 100000 people lived there at the same time. It is composed of hundreds of big barracks where slaves slept, like these ones:



This is the interior of one of those barracks. People used to sleep on those "shelves":



At the back of the camp there were two huge gas chambers and crematories. The SS tried to destroy the evidence of what they had been doing there before Soviets arrived there. They used TNT to destroy the gas chambers but did not completely succeed. Currently, the rumble in which they were turn into is still there. It is sad to think around 1 million people were killed only in this part of the extermination camps...



A hair-raising view of this area of the camp are the train tracks leading from the entrance to the gas chambers. Jewish and other minorities were brought to Auschwitz directly to die in the gas chambers. These tracks have seen so many people about to be killed. The image of the gate of the extermination camp (seen so many times in the movies) is also quite impressive.



So you know, don't forget history!! Let's not make the same mistakes again!!

Tatra Mountains

Tatra Mountains are a small group of mountains between Poland and Slovakia. It was a two and a half hours ride to Zakopane, the last town in the South of Poland and the place where a visit to the mountains should start. So, on Sunday, first thing in the morning, we hopped in a bus bound to Zakopane.

Once there, we bought some of the most famous food in the region, some kind of goat cheese, which was not so nice... some was smoked and others too salty...



This is the minibus we used to go to the top of the mountain. It was much cheaper than the train and we had it there, just at the bus station!




This is us when we arrived at the top of the mountain from where the nicest view of the mountains can be seen.



And this is the breathtaking view from there! Beautiful!



And what about the food we had? It looks good, does it not?!



In short, a nice day out in the mountains!

The other side of Krakow...

Yesterday, I talked about what we visited or saw in Krakow. But what did we do? What can you do there? What was there in the streets apart from buildings?? :)

A common thing Krakow shares with other Central and Eastern European cities is that everybody drinks a lot of beer at any moment. Our first pub in the city served a beer tower with 3 or 4 liters of beer inside!



The weather was really good our first day there and many people enjoyed the sun rays, oblivious to any other thing happening around them!



Some people wore traditional clothes. These two guys were in the touristic area, but in the mountains some people did wear it as normal clothing!



There were also plenty of horse carried vehicles... and Jorge seemed to really like them... he would stop every single time he saw a horse!



Of course, we had to write some postcards for family and friends at the same time we enjoyed Polish or Czech beer.



And finally, we went to one of the many jazz clubs in the city. The Old Metropolitan Band played and the show was really interesting! They were quite old but really enthusiastic!!

Krakow

Last weekend I went to Krakow in the South of Poland with my housemate Felipe and my ex-house mate Jorge: therefore, we could call this a housemates' trip :)

Krakow is a nice city with a medieval city centre, with a castle, towers, churches... quite interesting and enjoyable! I was quite surprised that things were not cheap. In other Eastern countries, such as Czech Republic or Hungary, prices were quite low in comparison with the Netherlands. However, that was not the case in Krakow... and maybe not in Poland! The weather was also pretty nice as you can see in the following shots.

The first thing we visited was the Jewish Ghetto, Kazimierz, and then the castle. This is what the castle looks like from outside: a wall with medieval towers and some towers inside.



And this is a shot of the inner square, with a Krakow's cathedral and the castle palace. In this cathedral, Polish kings were buried.



In downtown, the main place is a huge square, actually the biggest medieval square in Europe, with a tower, a market and a beautiful church.




At the northern-most part of the city centre, there was a beautiful area with well-preserved walls. Downtown used to be surrounded by walls, now it is surrounded by a nice park.



At night, important building were nicely lit up. This is the Opera Theatre:



And this is back at the main square:



The trip to Krakow was quite intense. We visited the city on Saturday and then on Sunday, we moved to Tatra Mountains, between Poland and Slovakia, and on Monday, we visited Auschwitz/Bikernau extermination camps...

It started as a trip to Krakow and turned up to be a trip to the South of Poland ;-)