31 August,

Here be Dragons.

Hello friends.

When last I left off I was arriving in Krakow, which was a good city as Polish cities go, me having the wide expanse of three to judge by, one of which consisted only of a railway station. You’ll be happy to learn that Krakow is by far the best.



The first big draw is the town square, Ranek Glowny, which is without a doubt the biggest town square you’ve ever seen, unless maybe you consider Times Square the town square of NYC. This was pretty much the opposite of that, though not completely without neon. In the middle of the old town, it was several blocks wide and long of open space. There was one long, airport hangar size building smack in the center which was filled with small booths where people sold crafts, jewelry and other gift type things, and there were two small church/cathedral type buildings along the sides, but otherwise it was open space with stone tiles covering the entire thing. All the outer lying buildings were either storefronts or restaurants, and the restaurants made a steady ring around that outer perimeter of umbrella shaded tables 10 deep. All in all, several thousand tables and easily seating enough for ten thousand people. Plenty of room to sit and watch people (many, many tourists) pass by. Unlike most of the other cities I’ve been in, the square really was the center of Krakow, not just geographically, but culturally. Things quieted down as you moved away from it, and it seemed to be equally popular among all the ages groups, from teenagers walking around and flirting with one another to the older folks walking a bit then sitting and having a drink or dinner. Other than the restaurants, it felt a lot like being on the block where everyone went cruising when I was in high school.

Okay, other than the restaurants and the street performers. Here are three examples. I'm sure you had no idea that Elvis was alive and well in Poland, or that the best mime routine - wait, let me give that higher praise - one of the best street performers I've ever seen who happened to be a mime, did some great physical comedy on a bicycle, or that street dancing was alive and well in Krakow Old Town. I also heard the best accordian player I've ever heard in my entire life, but I didn't get a photo of him.





So far on this trip I haven’t bought anything other than food and drink and a few postcards. Having to carry everything on your back makes one very particular about buying keepsakes. I had to break down here though, as my headphones for my ipod got busted and I had to spring for a new set, and it so happened that the store where I bought them also had a good selection of English language novels, so I made one purchase there as well (then went back again when I was about to leave and was stuck with 30 zlatas – not enough to get exchanged for a different currency, but soon to be useless to me. I spent them on two more books – Dorian Gray and Dubliners), picking up a wordsworth edition of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in one edition. I wanted some of Twain’s travel writing, but alas, fictional travel was the best I could do. Anyway, the reason I mention this is because I almost broke down again in what I think of as the crafts hangar and bought a chess set. Two different places has some really amazing hand carved wooden sets for incredibly cheap. All were of the box that folds out with a board on it type, and they varied in size and detail of the carving.  The cheapest were probably ten or twelve inches square with really nice pieces for 25 zlatas, which is around $8 or so. They ranged up to sets that were twice or three times that size with marvelously ornate carving and a gorgeous finish for 300 – 400 zlatas. These were sets that could easily sell for several hundred dollars in the US. The ones I was eyeing were in the 80 – 100 range with nice weighted pieces and great detail. If I’d thought out what I was doing, given the fact that I sent some things home at the last minute on my last day there (a shirt I wasn’t wearing much, climbing shoes which hadn’t seen any use, receipts, etc), I’d have definitely bought one of these, and maybe a couple as gifts, but in the end, I didn’t. So there you have my one big regret about not buying something so far.



I spent most of my nights in the square in one place or another, and tried several of the restaurants. I can’t say that any of them stood out, which is too bad, considering how good the food has been thus far, and how much I liked the city. Days were nice to walk around there as well, after seeing a lot of the old town, and the castle, of course.

Which leads me to the other key point you need to know about Krakow. They have dragons. Not real ones, not anymore, but you can go into a real dragon cave, and the sculpture nearby that breathes fire is pretty damn scary. Now, I know what you’re thinking - pretty much every medieval European city had a dragon at some point, and a knight to slay it, not to mention a maiden that needed saving and a wicked stepmother. But in Krakow its not just legend. In the southern part of the city is Wawel Castle, a pretty impressive piece of work that overlooks the river and has stood for several hundred years. According to the travel guides, and tourist signs, Krakow was founded when Prince Krak came upon this bend in the river and met a dragon. He killed it of course, being a Prince and a Knight, and not knowing that dragons were endangered, and built a castle atop the dragon’s cave. And so it is that the cave is there to this day, inside the walls of the castle, and for 4 zlatas you can walk the steps down into it and breathe the stench of several hundred year old dragon droppings. The rest of the castle is nice too, though I didn’t spend the money for the ten various tickets it required to see the whole thing. Don’t think less of me if I admit I’m starting to suffer from Castle burnout.



In any case, everywhere you go in Krakow, every tourist stand that sells maps and postcards also sells cute stuffed dragons as well, and given that my High School mascot was a dragon, we were the Fairland Dragons if you’re curious, I briefly considered buying one of those or a ceramic one or something, and sending it to my dad as his keepsake from my trip, but again, wear and tear on my back and knees won out, as well as the fact that any of the good ones would have likely gotten broken (not stuffed, but ceramic, of course) and I simply filed it away for later reference. One other interesting thing to note is that while all the tourist representations of the dragon were cute and cuddly, the huge sculpture of the dragon, created fairly recently, though I can’t remember how recent, was not. In fact, it was a fantastically foreboding piece of metalwork with flames shooting from its snout. Sadly, when I saw it my camera batteries were dead, but I did find a postcard of it, and so maybe I’ll try to take a picture of that to show you.

On Monday the horrors turned more real. It was a about an hour and a half by microbus to Oswiecim, as the village was known in Polish. The Germans called it Auschwitz, and that is the name that stuck outside Poland. These days, that is the name of the camps, and the city retains its traditional name. The bus dropped us outside the gates of Auschwitz 1, which is what is commonly known as Auschwitz, but is only a small part of the entire complex. Walking in, it was almost inviting, with old, but well kept brick buildings two stories high, nicely tended grass and old trees shading the entire thing. Something that occurred to me as I was walking around that part of the camp was that it was easy to let my mind drift off and forget what happened in those buildings. I began to wonder why some places retain the feeling of their history and others don’t. The buildings were originally Polish army barracks, and so were very regular in their spacing and construction, but the trees and the grass tempered the regularity. One thing I want to come back to in writing is the idea of whether places retain a memory of good and bad things done in them. If so, how much good has to be done in a place like that to begin to even the books?

We arrived just in time for the English language tour, which I opted to take, but my traveling companions (two Australians and a student from Japan who I met on the bus there) chose not to. The tour was a good choice, though I wish I could have had it both ways, taking the tour and getting some history, and then walking around and having time to explore some of the other places that we skipped. As it was, seeing the entire thing like that would have taken more hours than I had, and would have been, perhaps, more than my psyche could handle. I was surprised on the way back to find that many of my busmates were there for the second, third, or even (in one case) fifth time. It didn’t occur to me to ask why they would come back, though now, days later it’s the only thing I can wonder about.

I have to admit at this point to being stuck for several days about writing anything about this. So many amazing things have been written and created about the Holocaust, anything I have to say seems miniscule and pitiful in comparison. Hell, in the face of the actual subject it all seems pathetic in comparison. I didn’t take any photos inside. They allow them on the grounds, but ask that you don’t take them inside the buildings, but even that wasn’t really enforced, as there was an obnoxious photographer on our tour who pretty much started snapping away anywhere he felt like it. I was embarrassed, despite the fact that I didn’t know him at all. There are a few buildings where the guide told us what we would see before we entered, and asked that we not speak inside – mainly the places where its known that large numbers of people died. It’s a fine distinction though, as they were more where the killing was outright intentional, in the gas chambers and the torture rooms, rather than just methodical, in the barracks.

We went in and out of about a dozen of the buildings, with each one being focused towards various displays, such as the background, or whatever. A few, the most horrific of them, were mostly kept in the same condition they were found when the camp was overrun by the soviets. These were the ones where prisoners were tortured, or where the gas was first tested, or people were just lined up against the wall and shot in the back of the head. Others were turned into displays of the various countries that were affected, twenty in all, though I can’t help thinking that number feels too small. Is it really true that out of the millions of people killed, they only came from twenty countries in Eastern and Central Europe? A couple of them showed the little that remains of those killed… entire rooms of luggage, hair, shoes, brushes, eyeglasses – all of them piled high, indistinguishable from one another, just as the Nazis saw them. In the ideal world, each of those items would have its own room, its own focus, and a history of a person next to it. This is the briefcase of… The museum would be too large for anyone to see, of course, but that would be part of the point, that the entire thing is incomprehensible.

After around two hours in the original camp, we got on the shuttle bus and were taken on the 3 – 5 minute ride to Birkenou, also known (now, though I’m not sure about earlier) as Auschwitz two. This is the place that most people really think of when you say the name, with train tracks going through the main gate and stretched back into the grounds more than a full kilometer (about three quarters of a mile to my Metric phobic friends). On one side are dozens and dozens, maybe as many as a hundred brick barracks that are all still standing. On the other side (the right, as you move into the camp) there is one row of wooden barracks that have been rebuilt, and then behind that row, evenly spaced as far as the eye can see, are stone chimneys and three foot tall slabs that ran down the center of each building, all that remains of the rest of them. There were just a few things that made me realize the enormity of what had happened there, and looking out over a field of stone chimneys that went on for well over half a mile in each direction, knowing each one represented a building where several hundred men were kept was really the first one. Realizing that those men, the ones who made it to the barracks, were the lucky ones is much harder. If I would have let myself take any photos, that is the first one I would tried to capture – the image of hundreds of small chimneys stretched out over the green field.

2 September.

I’ve been struggling with how to write about Auschwitz and what to say for almost a week now, and the above paragraphs were put down yesterday, in just a quick attempt to write something. Now I find I haven’t any desire to try to go back and read them, or rewrite them, but at the same time, am completely unhappy with what they say. In the interest of getting on with this journal, I’m going to skip past Auschwitz after relaying just two more facts that somehow are necessary to understanding my experience there.

First, Auschwitz has a gift shop. You can buy snacks (though there is no eating on the grounds itself) books about the holocaust, and yes, postcards. The entire memorial was extremely well thought out and incredibly respectful of the victims it was memorializing, except for this one fact. I am still trying to imagine the person who sends loved ones a postcard from Birkenou. I have to admit that this is a small fact, and in the intervening time, its importance has lessened, but at the time, after walking around Birkenau for over an hour and discovering it, I was saddened.

In talking with the tour guide afterwards, as the two of us walked the distance from the end of the tracks where the ruins of the gas chambers and the memorial are, back to the main gate, I asked him how many tours he had given here (one a day, usually) and if it had an effect on him as a person. He said he didn’t think it had, but then again, how could it not? He’d grown up in a town less than 5km from there, and his parents worked as tour guides as well. He’d grown up with it, and while it was important work to make sure people knew and remembered what happened there, one also had to remember that it was history. It happened in the past, done to and by other people, most of whom were long dead, and didn’t say anything about what our world had to be. In other words, this is the past, and we have a choice about what the present is. I found this comforting, somehow. Strange, being the optimist that I am, having to be comforted by the man who gives tours of the single most evil place in all of human history.

That definitive statement sounds strange coming from me, but if I ever would have doubted its truth, the last fact I have to relay would have convinced me otherwise. Finally, as we walked back, Lukas (the tour guide) pointed out some large water reservoirs spaced evenly along the way. They were basically deep indentions of concrete, filled with water (probably naturally, by the rain), each one with a sign above it indicating that it held 130 cubic meters of water. I told him I had noticed them, and meant to ask but I didn’t want to interrupt the tour. They were obviously something official, related to the construction or maintenance afterwards (it was possible they’d been added after the camp was turned into a museum). He said, “No, they are original, built when the camp was built. I will give you a hint. Birkenou was insured.”  It will sound like an exaggeration, but I felt like someone had punched me in the stomach. An entire level of comprehension was stripped away from me and one and added at the same time. Birkenou was insured against being destroyed, and part of the requirements for insuring it were that a certain quantity of water had to be kept at regular intervals to put out fires. I almost feel stupid now for not knowing it, but the camp was meant to last a long, long time. There were entire companies, consortiums of insurance men in neat suits with secretaries and mathematical tables that were willing to guarantee that it would, as long as certain provisions were made, such as making sure there was always water on hand to fight fires. Having made that realization, and feeling a little sick, I felt like my tour was over and headed for the exit.

And so, after taking the shuttle bus back to Auschwitz 1, I headed for the main gate out of the camp as quickly as I could. I waited for a bit, with a bunch of people there, most of them trying to sort out when the next bus was coming. I started talking with a British couple, talking about the bus back and where the microbus would stop, and various inanities, anything except the tour we’d just taken. In short order we’d caught a microbus back to Krakow, leaving the suckers behind to pay 1 zl less for a ride that lasted a good two and a half hours rather than one and a half, at most. A couple other Brits were on there with us, and pretty quickly it turned into real conversation rather than just distraction from what we’d just seen, and Heather and Dan seemed like great people. They were on a sort of extended honeymoon, traveling the world while Dan waited on his paperwork to allow him to work in Canada came through (she was from there, but had lived in Britain the last two years, they’d met while traveling some time before that). As it turned out, the paperwork came through about a year ahead of schedule, so they actually had to cancel part of the trip through Europe to go back to London for three weeks, then they were headed to Africa for 6 months and then South America for six months. I think I’ve remembered that correctly. Apologies to Heather and Dan if I’ve screwed it up a week later. I’d have liked to spent some more time with them, and almost invited them out to dinner, but I had a bus to catch that night. I took a last walk around Renek Glowny, deciding how to spend my last 30 zlatas and contemplating chess sets and stuffed dragons.

In the movies, when the hero goes into the dragon’s cave for the first time, the thing we see is always the remains of all those less noble folks who’d come before him. Bones of the non-heroic scattered around the floor crunch underfoot and serve as a perfect backdrop for the horror that is about to be faced. But at least dragon’s fire leaves the bones. The crematoriums of the Nazis burned even the bone and scattered the ashes over a distance. We’re reached the point where we are more terrifying than our own nightmares.

More soon, and love to all my friends,

Stephen