Day 2: Off to Poland via Auschwitz

Entering Auschwitz - "Work will set you free"

Before we start this, I want to say that this was the most important day in the trip for me, as our main stop was a living memorial for one of the most brutal pieces of human history. I will of course though talk in further detail about that when we get to it.

My first full day on a Contiki holiday started with an 8am jet off on our bus - our very own branded coach! It did mean a 6.30am wake up call for breakfast, shower and sorting out my suitcase. Thankfully after our good morning song (yeah, that's a thing - it's Waiting For Tomorrow by Martin Garrix and Pierce Fulton feat. Mike Shinoda), I went and had a good long sleep..... only to be woken up by Let It Go being blasted through the bus a few hours later.... Never thought I would be woken up by Idina Menzel but there we go.

Our first stop was a shopping centre in the middle of nowhere in the Czech Republic for lunch. Admittedly, when we got to the food court, because no one could understand a word of what the other menus said, we went for KFC - it was truly the safest option... Thankfully, no more finger lickin' good chicken for the rest of the trip. After picking up some more snacks for the journey, we hopped back on the bus for our main stop: Auschwitz Birkenau Concentration Camp, located no more than an hour and a half away from Krakow.

The camp was as eye-opening and harrowing as you would expect; you think you know what happened here, but it is one thing learning about it at school and walking around the camp where millions of people were brought to and either worked in all weathers, or sent to the gas chambers for execution. Our tour guide Joanna (who was excellent) told us not just facts, but individual stories, including one of a Catholic Father who took the place of another prisoner in the starvation cell. He died in that cell, but the prisoner he saved ended up surviving Auschwitz.

We got to go inside and around some of the huts (or Baraks) the prisoners were living in, which of course had terrible living conditions, and diseases were running rampant. There were no proper sanitary facilities, and the prisoners were expected to work all day long with very little to eat or drink.

"A place full of shoes with no people"

Perhaps the most moving thing for me though was inside the exhibit huts; some of them had glass running down the sides of the corridors, kind of like a fish tank; but instead of goldfish, they were full of items collected by the prisoners murdered here: mountains of glasses, human hair, shoes, suitcases with prisoners names and addresses written on them; and most moving for me, crutches and prosthetic limbs, mostly from children.
Hitler wanted a "pure race" and so any kind of "impurity" was persecuted: Joanna told us that disabled people were some of the first to be persecuted by the Nazis maybe even before the Jewish were. I did take a picture of the tank with the limbs in, and I'm so surprised that it came out ok, as my hand was shaking with hurt and anger.

If you visit Krakow, or any of the surrounding towns, Auschwitz and Auschwitz II Birkenau is something that you have to do. It's painful, and sombre, harrowing and haunting; but we owe it to the millions of innocent people who died there to keep this living memorial alive and to prevent history from repeating itself.

I want to end this bit about Auschwitz with something hopeful though. We came across many groups on our tour, but one group was some high-school children, all wearing white hoodies with the blue star of David on the back of them. It was moving (in the right way this time), to see them walking around and taking it in.

After the tour, it was about an hour drive to Krakow itself, where we stayed at the ibis Budget Hotel. I ended up having a room to myself as (at the time), I was the odd girl out. We had dinner at the hotel, but the pudding wasn't actually that great (it was a crepe filled with ricotta cheese), so Mikeala, Emily, Naomi and I decided to walk into the Old Town to a bakery and get "2nd pudding". I had a cake that was chocolate base with white choc mousse and blood orange jelly on top - it was delish!

Krakow was one of the 2 cities in which we stayed for 2 nights, so next up is the adventures of our full day there :)