The sky was appropriately gray as we set off to [Auschwitz](../../mnt/user-data/uploads/glauschw.htm) this morning. Fred and I had decided that after a full day of walking around in the glowing serenity that constitutes Krakow, we could both stand a dose of sobering reality. The desired effect of gloominess was quickly dispelled, however. After a brief encounter with Krakow's suburbs, we found ourselves surrounded by gorgeous scenery, all crickety-sounding and harvest-smelling, with a fuzzy yellow sun poking through the clouds above our heads. It felt terrific to be riding unburdened for a change, slicing through a ripping headwind with relative ease. Many of the houses we passed were made of interlocking notched beams, reminding me of the Lincoln Logs I played with as a kid.
At every turn of the winding, roller-coaster road, our eyes were greeted with more scenes of pastoral life: a man tilling his field with a horse-drawn plow; a hunchbacked \"apple lady\" (Fred's term for an old woman whose face resembles a dried apple) shlepping two buckets of milk on a yoke across her shoulders; peasants of both sexes pulling hand-hewn wooden carts full of hay; a skinny man riding his bike while carrying a long-handled scythe (a common sight for us over the past few weeks, which normally arouses superstitious feelings in me, though today it seemed fitting). The people engaged in these menial tasks are invariably elderly, making you realize that they're a vanishing breed.
Their offspring doubtless ride tractors and drive cars, which I realize saves them a lot of toil; but bourgeois American that I am, I still find the older ways more picturesque. After only 2½ hours and sixty kilometers of swift pedaling, we had arrived in Oswiecim, a small and nondescript town made famous by the Nazis' decision to build their largest concentration camps here. We first stopped at Birkenau (a.k.a. Auschwitz II), which despite having been largely destroyed by Germans fleeing the Soviet army, is as horrifying and imposing a sight as I've ever seen. Its vast size attests to the massive scale of the operation.
Only several rows of buildings remain, framing a huge field of foundations and chimneys belonging to what was once over 300 separate prison barracks. High barbed wire fences, punctuated by watch towers, surround the whole complex. Train tracks lead right through the center of the camp to the gas chambers and crematoria on the far side of the site, where over a million people were systematically exterminated. Fred and I wandered around under the drizzle, seeking refuge in barracks buildings when the rain got harder. On the walls inside, the German slogans in gothic font were chillingly intact, as were sketches and paintings made by prisoners.
What struck me was how recent it all seemed, especially after medieval Krakow. All of these buildings were occupied, with trains of people arriving to be gassed every day, less than twenty years before I was born. It's enough to make one question the very nature of civilization. Auschwitz I was only a couple of kilometers away, but strikingly different in scale and feel from the vast and efficient killing machine of Birkenau. With it tree-lined streets and tidy buildings reminiscent of college dormitories, the older camp felt almost like a country village, harboring a cottage industry in the shadow of its behemoth, assembly-line style neighbor.
Inside the buildings, though, are literally heaps and heaps of testimony to the horrors of the place. One hall housed 43,000 pairs of victims' shoes, many of them belonging to murdered children, while another contained a virtual mountain of human hair, once destined to be shipped back to the Reich and made into cloth. Other buildings were devoted to accounts of life in the camp, while still more were assigned to individual countries' experience of the war and its atrocities. We stumbled into the hall of the Soviet Union, which suffered a total of 20,000,000 war dead. Confronted with such massive tragedy, Fred and I felt awash in an overwhelming numbness.
At five p.m. there was a screening of a film documenting the Soviet liberation of Auschwitz dubbed in English. After a prolonged misunderstanding between Fred and the projectionist-ticket-taker, we sat in the dark while mosquitoes munched on us and a group of Germans talked loudly and behaved as if on a visit to Disneyland. While we had intended to ride back to Krakow, the sun was already low in the sky by now. Polish roads are no place to be riding at dusk, so we grudgingly climbed aboard another train, the slowest I've ever been on. It deposited us in Krakow at about the same time that our bikes would have, and the short ride from the station to the town center was no fun at all.
A concert benefiting flood victims in the west of Poland was underway on the central square, where we had to push our way through throngs of drunken teens. We intentionally chose a quiet place for dinner, the restaurant of the Hotel Francuski, which features mediocre food and appallingly bad service in an elegant setting. Back in our room, the t.v. is tuned to the only station broadcasting in English. Fred and I have determined that Sky News --the UK's answer to CNN---should be renamed \"Di News,\" since that's all that they've been covering, commercial free, since yesterday morning. The princess's death has actually affected me more than I'd ever thought it would, probably since it happened in Paris and involved a car.
An evil car.