Arbeit macht frei

'Work makes you free'.

Wow. Today was the day me and the boy visited Auschwitz. It was strangely quite pleasant outside with the sun shining down on us. Luckily we opted for a tour package, so a nice Polish lady whose English was very good walked us around the building giving us all the horrific details of what went on there. The most dramatic part for me was seeing the shoes, a tale of sorrow behind each pair. When you hear 1.1 million Jews were killed you are horrified but it's not until you see a room full of their belongings (and less than 1% of their belongings survived) that it sinks in and you realise just how barbaric the German army was back then. An image which will haunt me for a long time was in the building where individual pictures hang of the prisoners taken as they arrived, just after being stripped of hair and clothes and given their striped pyjamas. The picture was of a girl. You couldn't tell as the picture was black and white and she had had her head shaved but she was fair and had blue eyes, a rarity for a Jew. Because of her colourings she was saved and was sent to Germany to be adopted by a German family, the other kids on the wall weren't so lucky...I wonder what happened to her.

Next stop was Birkenau (Auschwitz II), built because Auschwitz was not set up for mass exterminations. The gas chambers were burnt down a few days before the Jews were liberated but you could still see the entrance they had to go down, believing they were taking a shower only never to leave. The lady told us it is believed that one person did survive. Buried under pile of bodies she managed to keep breathing with the little air trapped beneath the bodies.

Next stop, the building where they slept. Triple bunks which slept ten on each level. Apparently there was enough room though as they were so thin from being fed so little. I always had this impression in my head that they would have stuck together helping each other out as best they could. Not the case when it came to bed time, they had to fight for a place on the top bunk. Due to their poor diet and disease they had no control over bowel movement, so if you were on the bottom bunk you could have been covered by human poo as well as bitten by rats on the floor below.

The last building was pretty busy with a crowd of people gathered up the far corner listening to a little old lady. The little old lady was one of the few survivors of Auschwitz. This made it oh so real for me.

An amazing place, which really does make you look at the world in a different light. It really wasn't that long ago and such horrific things could so easily happen somewhere else in the world just by one mans crazy ideas. Scary, scary prospect.

On a lighter note we followed it up with beer, a trip round the cloth hall for tacky souvenirs (nothing purchased), snapping more street entertainers then another fabulously, tasty and cheap meal at the main square (Polish 'nipple' soup and trout for the boy, horseradish and bacon soup followed by pork for me) As my nephew would say deeee-lious. No vodka today, must try harder tomorrow.