My Own Auschwitz Experience

While planning my trip through Eastern Europe, ensuring that I saw Auschwitz was my top priority. On the Monday before Halloween 2007, as I was finishing up my stay in Krakow, I was able to take a tour of the nearby Auschwitz and Birkenau death camps.

(I have pictures for this, but need to locate them.)

The tour almost didn't happen. When I got to Krakow the preceding Saturday, I realized two facts in my first hour or so there:

1) My hotel was a decent walk from the Krakow train station, especially with my luggage.
2) Once I could see my hotel, it was clear that it was across a highway from where I was with no obvious way for a pedestrian to cross to the other side; a massive construction project had made a mess of the whole area around it.

Eventually, after a few false starts, I figured out the path to take, which involved walking significantly past my hotel on my side of the road along construction fences and barriers, finding the cross walk, waiting for traffic to thin or stop, carefully and quickly crossing the highway, and then backtracking to my hotel. Fortunately it was still daylight when I tried this the first time and traffic was relatively light since it was a Saturday afternoon. (This became a lot more fun in the evenings after Polish daylight saving time ended Saturday night.)

On Monday morning, though, the construction had impaired morning commuter traffic around my hotel significantly. The tour was arranged through the hotel, and we were supposed to meet outside the lobby at 8:45 AM for a 9 AM pickup. I went outside and joined the big crowd mulling. As the pick-up time approached and then passed, it became clear that we weren't going to start exactly on time. As minutes of standing or pacing in the cold elapsed and I listened to the conversations various groups were having, I became worried that I was with the wrong group. I asked a few people and learned, sure enough, this was a different tour group than mine.

After a few frantic minutes of asking various people which tours they were on, I finally located my own tour guide, who looked a little despondent. She was in frequent phone contact with our driver and told me that traffic was at an absolute standstill on the highway outside and that the driver didn't really know when he would be able to fight his way through.

After a half hour of waiting, the guide told the few of us that we could go inside and she'd come fetch us in the lobby when the driver arrived.

After close to an hour, the driver arrived, but then another problem was apparent. He was only the driver for us and a few other people nearby. We now had to fight our way back out and meet up with the main tour group, and traffic wasn't getting any better. I'm sure I wasn't the only one wondering how long they'd delay the main tour group before giving up on us.

The next forty minutes or so were spent inching through a whole series of traffic snarls with lts of aggressive driving and horns honking. At one traffic circle, our driver had an extended, heated argument with a traffic cop who stopped us just as it was our turn to merge in to the main flow and let dozens of cars from all the other arteries get in front of us.

Eventually we made it to the main tour bus and were able to start off the trip to Auschwitz. When we got there, the bus was almost full and had been sitting waiting for us for most of an hour. This left few seats open to us late-comers. And that leads to another story.

But that's another post for another day.

Never Forget

Auschwitz was liberated by Soviet Forces 64 years ago today (Tuesday 27 January); below is a 5-minute YouTube video commemorating this anniversary. (h/t: Andrew Sullivan)