"So why are you going to Poland?"

            

I’m starting off this blog-extravaganza with an account of this past weekend in Krakow, Poland because it’s fresh in my mind and my blog posts about these recent weeks in Italy may take up as many as five extra blog posts, so I’ll save you that torturous experience for later ;) In the meantime…to Krakow!

            The choice to go to Poland was a pretty random one. I have had about twenty people ask me why I was going to Poland and the answer is that I had originally intended to use this weekend to visit my friend Ambar who is currently studying in Spain, but tickets to Spain were either ridiculously expensive or at really difficult departure times, so I postponed that plan and tried to find something else to fill my time. It seemed like everyone in our program had already planned out their trips and I was trying to find something different than the usual American student study abroad trips of London, Paris, Madrid. Scrolling through the possible locations that RyanAir flies to, I saw Krakow, Poland. The flight was relatively cheap and the times were perfect; then I googled Krakow and saw things like (1) largest main square in all of Europe, (2) cultural capital of Poland, (3) 700 year-old salt mine with underground lakes and cathedrals, (4) Wawel Castle, (5) St. Mary’s Church, (6) Polish food, (7) an Eastern European city as close to Prague as possible and so so so much more.

            So I turned to Lily in ECCO’s library while we were studying and said: “Hey. Do you want to go to Poland?”

            Lily is pretty much game for anything and Lydia (another girl in our program) soon joined in. This past Thursday we left a very sunny and warm Bologna to the frozen tundra of Krakow. I am being only slightly dramatic.

            We got in at around six to the airport and decided to take a taxi for the thirty-minute ride into the city center because—guess what?—the currency exchange rate between the American dollar and the Polish zloty is 3 to 1. So that’s 3 zloty to 1 American dollar people. SO EVERYTHING IS CHEAP. I will keep bringing this up because the amount of things we did this weekend for so little money still amazes me.

            We got a nice welcome to Poland right away; our taxi driver’s radio started playing “Thrift Shop” and he turned it up when he heard us laugh at the strangeness of hearing the song on a Polish radio. He then asked us—in somewhat broken English—to explain the lyrics of the song because even though he knew most of the words, he didn’t actually understand what any of them meant. After this he was nice enough to try to teach us a few Polish words like “thank you,” “good morning,” and “good bye.” Polish for some reason sounds like a strange combination of German and Chinese and it was actually really difficult to repeat any of the words he tried to teach us. By the end of the taxi ride, we had asked him to repeat the pronunciation of “thank you” about seven times, which is: dziękuję, which is pronounced something along the lines of JING-KU-YAY. The only other word in Polish that I learned for the weekend was tak = yes. Other than that, there was a serious language barrier for the three days we were there. It’s a good thing that the majority of the citizens of Krakow speak English because I’m not sure how things would have turned out, otherwise.

            We got to our Best Western Hotel (which is of course extremely cheap because of the amazingness of the zloty) and got settled in. We then headed out to a restaurant that Lily had researched beforehand, which was the first indicator of a solid trip: a place called Pod Baranem, which is run by a father and son. Polish presidents, painters and poets apparently frequently come here and I think Polish mob bosses as well, since we saw an extremely well-dressed man with a cigar at a Reserved table by himself, looking broody and dangerous in the dim light. The ceiling was held up by old, dark wooden beams and dried herbs hung down to where swords and boar’s heads were mounted. Everything was dark and lit by candles, with very well-dressed folk and three American girls in jeans and over-sized North Face jackets.

            We were only in Poland until Saturday night so we didn’t hold back for dinner. Our table looked something along the lines of this:

What you see there is two steaks, a plate of duck, two types of potatoes, fancy coleslaw, some sort of beet mash-up, water, and amazing Polish beer. After that we got three desserts (one for each of us and one to share) and then we each got a shot of their homemade vodka. The total cost of this feast? Less than 25 dollars each. YOU HEARD ME. Less than 25 dollars. I still can’t get over it. It was such a neat experience, eating at such a fancy restaurant with waiters who had actually been to Waiter School and placed your napkins on your laps and put your coat on for you when you stood up. It also felt very Polish, with all the ambiance and the dim lighting and the food…it was great. We made little attempt to pronounce the things on the menu in Polish because the English translations were right there and we would have probably somehow insulted our nice Polish waiters with our terrible pronunciation of their language.

            After dinner, it was below freezing outside and we were tired, so we headed back to the hotel, slipping on the black ice all over the sidewalk as we went. Once we were in the room we watched Polish television (always entertaining—particularly the show that we named Love Lives of Krakow) and went to sleep early, ready for an early start the next morning.

           

            On Friday we decided to do something that most people tend to avoid: we decided to go to the concentration camps of Auschwitz-Birkenau. Oświęcim is the Polish name for the city that played host to one of the most atrocious Nazi concentration camps in the history of World War II and it’s only about an hour and a half away from Krakow by train. Lydia really wanted to take a guided tour of the camps, but Lily and I preferred the solo route, so while Lydia was being picked up by a bus filled with wonderful British tourists at our hotel, Lily and I decided to brave the Polish train system. Surprisingly, despite our lack of Polish and the train station employee’s lack of English, we made it on our ridiculously old train to Oświęcim with no problems. Once we reached the dismally grim train station, we managed to navigate the local bus system to reach the outside of the city where the camps were without paying for bus tickets (where are the bus kiosks?!).

            Walking up to the camps was a really surreal experience, particularly because the modern city of Oświęcim has expanded so that the camps are no longer isolated and surrounded by miles of fields. Instead, there is a large parking lot in front of the museum that is packed with tour buses and SUV’s and high school classes on their rather grim field trips. Across the street is a strip mall, with restaurants and a hotel; although I don’t know who would ever want to stay in a hotel across the road from one of the most notorious concentration camps ever. Once you squeeze past the tour buses, you enter a very stark information center/museum where there are multiple guides waiting there to demand if you’d like a tour. Lily and I walked past these guys and went to the book store, where we both bought cheap guidebooks that actually had a predetermined tour planned out within it, complete with a map and a room-by-room explanation in all of the major buildings you could look into.

            Without paying for a guide, entrance into Auschwitz and Birkenau is completely free, so we just walked out of the doors of the information center and…we were walking towards the camps. The path was a sort of muddy cobblestone, made even more difficult by the fact that snow was drifting down from an entirely grey sky, so that puddles formed in the ruts of the walkway. Again, I can’t emphasize enough how unreal it felt. I’ve been reading about Auschwitz since I was little; I’ve always been interested in World War II and the history books are splattered with stories about Nazi cruelty and the plight of the millions of Jews and minorities that suffered in Auschwitz. But it’s especially weird to stand under that iron gate with the words, ARBEIT MACHT FREI—work will set you free.

            We walked through multiple buildings that used to be used as barracks, prison cells, administrative buildings, etc. It’s amazing how quiet it is. While just a few minutes before we had been accosted by the sounds of the street and cars zipping by and the advertisements of guides, trying to rope you into their tour group…within the camp it was quiet. It was just all so orderly, with the dark brick buildings in a perfectly organized grid pattern. So thought-out and precise. It still didn’t hit me, even when we went in and looked at the displays and the old artifacts. The museum/memorial portion of the camp did its job well: with each room, you were hit with more and more information, like a relentless slew of statistics and letters and pictures. With so much information being thrown at you all at once it was hard sometimes to really absorb it, which was a blessing in a way. But there were a few rough parts. A few? More like the entire experience. But some moments were worse than others.

            There was the room that had a wall filled with hair. Women’s hair, which was used to make rope and cloth for the army. The mug shots of the children. The Death Block. The thousands upon thousands of pictures that lined the walls of men and women staring straight ahead in their stripes. Some had no expression, some were angry, some confused. The worst ones were the eyes open wide in fear. Or maybe it was the eyes of the older men, whose faces showed grim resignation. As if they already knew.

            There's just something about the place that makes you want to say “I’m sorry.” We would walk from block 6 to block 7 and the snow would fall quietly on the muddy walkways and I just kept saying the words over and over again in my head: “I'm sorry.” I mean, what else can you say? You see thousands upon thousands of pictures and below them there’s a birth-date and a death-date and its just not. fair. There was one mug shot of a little girl who was eleven; you could see her eyes welling up with tears and I just wanted to reach into the photograph and pull her out. Pull her out and away from all of this. Her picture should’ve been hung up on the walls of her great-granddaughters house, not the walls of Auschwitz. And that Death Wall. And then the shoes.

            The room with the shoes is where I lost it. I think I had been numb to a lot of it until that moment. Lily had kept a steady mumbling of the statistics as we walked through, reading off the information and saying, “Oh God. Look. Look.” But it just did. not. hit me. And I don’t know why. But then there was that room with the shoes. There were children’s shoes and men’s nice leather oxfords and colorful, strappy sandals and high heels. You would think that because they were old shoes, they’d feel like they belonged to some distant era that couldn’t affect you, but some of the shoes looked like the ones that people would wear around campus. Those could’ve been my shoes. And there were just so many of them, immortalized on either side of you behind glass panes, and it just felt like they were closing in on me in that narrow, long room and my chest felt like it was constricting. I had to stand and look out the windows for a few minutes because I couldn't stop shaking and I was trying not to cry too loudly.

            And I’m just so so sorry. I don't know what else to say. I'm sorry that this happened. I'm sorry that the owners of those shoes never got to put them back on. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

            It became real after that, walking beside the barracks or seeing the gallows or worse, walking inside the crematorium. Think about that. Walking inside the crematorium. About seventy years ago, the people who walked inside that structure never walked out. I walked by the ovens and the one window and there was barely any light and the chimney…I could hear lily trying to breathe normally beside me because how can you breathe normally in a place like that, where people suffocated on smoke and gas and flame?

            I think it’s a place you have to go to. I think that it’s awful and disturbing and disgusting. But if you can do it, you should see it. You have to because if you don’t, those people won't be remembered and they have to be. If you don’t see it you won't actually feel the atrocities and most of all, you won't see those pictures of people who resisted, who fought back, who offered their lives up in exchange for others. Because those are the stories that make Auschwitz seem not as grim, if that's even possible. Those are the stories that you cling to, knowing that the other ones will destroy you if that’s all that was left. On the train returning to Krakow and the evening that followed, we came back to that always, like drowning people desperately clinging to life vests. The idea that people fought back and resisted made us feel better after a long day in the snow under barbed wire. That, and about an hour and a half of Polish television under blankets with bars of chocolate.

            After we had recovered that evening, we walked into the Kazimierz Jewish district and found a little hipster burger bar where we indulged our American cravings of cheeseburgers and potato wedges and milkshakes and smoothies. A big glass of hot milk and honey also warmed us up, as the cold seemed to have settled into our bones the moment we had walked through the gate of Auschwitz. We stayed there for hours talking and laughing and exchanging stories of home before walking back in the snow.

            The next morning we woke up early and explored Krakow in blinding sunshine and freezing cold. At around 10 am the market began to open up in the main square, which was wonderful. We basically ate our way through the day, starting with this weird, smoked cheese and then moving onto peirogi’s and kielbasa and more bagels and cupcakes (WE FOUND CUPCAKES). We walked around the area of the Main Square, going into St. Mary’s Church which was spectacular. Unlike Italian churches, which encourage tourism, St. Mary’s had a lot of signs that said “NO VISITING. PRAYER ONLY.” We dutifully ignored these signs and went to sit in the pews to respectfully admire the expansive Church from there, but unfortunately Mass started at that exact moment and when the bells and the incense came out along with the Eucharist, we realized we couldn’t afford to spend an entire hour in Polish Church, so we made the quickest escape possible and continued our exploration of the square.

            The market was just so much fun, with the music, the friendly people, the pottery and the beautiful Polish craftsmanship of painted wood. Afterwards we went up to Wawel castle, which offered a beautiful view of the city, and we also saw a Leonardo da Vinci painting! Up close and personal. All very cool and all under the brilliant sunshine and the blinding white of the snow. It was also marvelous because as blondes, we blended in as native Polish girls! People actually asked us for directions! We were so excited to blend in.

            We later explored the Jewish quarter some more and ate these weird, long pizza/sandwich hybrids called zapiekanka that were delicious but also made a mess as we tried to eat them outside. We ended up dropping food all over the ground and were attacked by pigeons who were trying to pick up the scraps. After a successful stop inside a little shop that sold jewelry made out of old watch pieces, we made our way to the airport where we got on our plane back to Bologna. It was nice to be back in my apartment, cuddled in bed with hot tea and the Polish bagels that I had packed along for the trip.

            It was such an amazing weekend. Lydia and Lily made great travel partners and we did so much for so little money in so little time. It was really neat going to a place that is so different from the rest of Europe; there’s a very distinct culture in Poland and it was wonderful going to a place that a lot of people don’t think of. Auschwitz was difficult, but so incredibly worth it. And Krakow was such an interesting city and I know that we barely scraped the surface of everything it had to offer. I’m really hoping to go back someday and I can’t help but smile every time I think about our weekend—it was probably one of my favorite weekends of my semester thus far.

            I’ll be updating all of you on daily life in Bologna in the next few days before my next adventures. Up next on my schedule is a program trip to southern Italy (home, here I come!) and Greece (yeee!). If you read all the way through this post, you are a champion and I love you. Keep an eye out for another update! More soon to follow.

A dopo ragazzi!

Danielle

© Copyright Danielle DeSimone. 2013.