On our first day there, Sarah and I took a walk around the Planty that surrounds the Old Town. The medieval walls that surrounded the city were largely demolished after 1807, so the city filled up the 50 or so empty acres with a series of connected gardens and parkland, now known as the Planty. After our stroll, we returned to the hostel to rest a bit as neither of us had gotten much sleep on the night train. I'm sure part of it was simply nerves, but it's hard to sleep when a small army of Border Control officials knock on the door at one in the morning! I can't really complain too much though because we had to buy 1st class due to the last-minute nature of the purchase and it was quite nice and comfortable.
The next day was a sobering experience, to say the least. We visited both the Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps. The barbed wire fencing and gate looming above with the words "Work Makes You Free" were all too real for me as I walked into the camp. It's not easy for me to articulate how I felt as I walked through the very buildings that victims of the Holocaust had lived in, been tortured in, and died in, but I know for sure that no amount of education could ever evoke such feelings. By the end of the day, any threads of happiness in my heart had been numbed by the cold and calculated Nazi cruelty that I had experienced.
One of the most horrifying stories was how the Nazi's kept the hair of the victims in the camps and used it to make valuable felt socks and blankets for German soldiers. Soviets found over 230 bags of it- over 15,000 lbs of hair. As we were walking through the museum of stolen possessions, we entered a room that had over 2,000 lbs of that same hair on display. It was utterly shocking. In the following rooms were hundreds of suitcases, pots and pans, hairbrushes, and shoes; it is believed that Nazi's collected somewhere between 15 and 16 million pairs of shoes from their victims. Walking through the square were thousands of people were executed, and then through the crematorium (the smallest one, holding only 700 people) gave me an awful sense of reality.Though very little remains of Birkenau, the vastness of the camp and hardship of life is incredibly profound. Looking down the barbed wire perimeter, one cannot see the end; I felt like the sheer size of it was incomprehensible until I was actually standing there, imagining the endless rows of barns filled with thousands of victims. Life was so difficult that the average leg nth of stay at the camp was only three months; for me, that was mind-boggling.
The next day was a bit happier, so to speak, as we were visiting the salt mine of Wieliczka. Naturally I was compelled to lick the walls once or twice, but the mine itself was quite interesting. I was most intrigued by the fact that everything about it is man-made; it is not a "natural wonder" per se. No longer used at full capacity, the salt production of the mine comes from the distillation of its salt water and is distributed locally. To the best of my knowledge, it's something like 700 years old, and 327 meters deep (about 1/4 mile). The miners would keep horses in the caves for power, and I was very surprised to learn that the last one left only 6 years ago! Overall though, I thought it was pretty neat operation; the Poles refer to it as their "White Gold."After a long day, we got back on the night train and returned to Budapest, knowing quite well that when we woke up we would be walking from the station right into class. I'm exhausted at this point, but it was a good trip and well worth it. Next week are the mid-term exams so I'll be studying this coming weekend. Quite alright though, because in two weeks I'll be touring Prague and Vienna!
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