Today we caught the train.

Early: at  0700. 

We got off the train.

Late: at 1800.

It was a long trip, very little happened in the intervening period, but I have to make a blog entry out of something, so here it goes:

Breakfast was the traditional ‘7 Days’ chocolate spread-filled croissant that was washed down with a healthy dose of sleep. At some point later (hours really did blur into each other) we read books (The Kite Runner for me, very good), magazines (finished the issue of Empire that had been teasing me for weeks) and played iPhone games (FlightControl!). Then we slept some more.

Lunch was a variety of cookies and sandwiches we had brought onboard and was more a boredom-relief measure than anything else…

…we slept a bit more…

…then NS disappeared off the the back of the train to take some pictures. Minutes later he returned with an awkward grin.

“I can’t shut the door,” he half snickers.  With sharp words I sent him on his way to sort it out as he had now made me accessory to manslaughter. It turns out that he had opened the back door of the train to take a photo like last year.

But this was not Romania and the doors are electric. So once they were pulled open, they would not shut.

He returned satisfied he’d made the train door toddler-proof and our journey continued…until the German boarder. Here, we incurred a mysterious delay as an army of DeutscheBahn technicians headed to the rear of the train with a variety of power tools – how curious!

We slept….

…until we arrived late in Berlin Hauptbanhof, a monumental building with many layers of train tracks running through it.

 We were met by Mr. Stylianou’s Uncle Steel and his son, George who gave us a lift to Jetpak Hostel, where we spent an inordinately long time checking in thanks to the overly chatty Australian masquerading as the receptionist. Afterwards we went for an Italian at a local restaurant and had a very pleasant dinner with good company.

After this, we were desperately flagging with travel fatigue, so we gave our thanks and headed back to the hostel for another very deep sleep.

Passing another one of Poland’s impressive churches on the way, up the hill we went. For over five hundred years, Wawel Hill was the seat of Poland’s monarchy, and we bought ourselves tickets to the Royal Treasury & Armoury. Of note, we managed to see the country’s original coronation sword (”Szczerbiec”) and some weaponry. We’re boys, we like weaponry; so we spent a while admiring the vast array of guns, bayonets, crossbows and cannons.

Also on the hill was the cathedral, built ion 1020 with many additions added during the 1400s. The cathedral museum was a bit like a walk-in wardrobe, with lots and lots of religious robes, not least including those belonging to the Catholic Pride Of Poland, Krakow’s very own John Paul II.

Inside the cathedral, the crypt houses the majority of Poland’s forty-five monarchs and the many other tombs and side-chapels have a vast array of influences, among impressive Renaissance and Gothic artistry.

A trip up the tower was in order (and included in our entry price) and we admired views of Krakow around the cathedral’s frankly enormous bell.

With all that done, it was time for lunch, And a beer. With the knowledge that the bus for the salt mines left at 1500 and our synchronised watches telling us it was already 1415, this would have to be a quick one. Settling for some nice pierogi z miesem on the castle hill, the lovely Polish waitress admired my linguistic skills in ordering the food so much that she was willing to abandon her career to teach me her language. Sadly, we had to love her and leave her, and off we went – full of carbohydrates – back to the centre of town and the Krakow City Tours office where we nabbed the last two bus tickets for the Salt Mine Tour.

Glady welcoming the air-conditioned bus, we set off on the hour-long trip to the drop-off point at Wieliczka, where we had to walk up a pedestrianised hill before coming to the entrance of the salt mines.

Along with the rest of our multi-national group, comprising such far-away citizens of Australia, UK and the United States, we descended many, many, many stairs.

During our >3km walking underground tour included various statues [like Madame Tussauds] of workers in the mines throughout the ages,  There were even horses working (and living) down there in the Middle Ages! 

With NM sceptical that everything we saw (including statues) were made of salt, he licked the wall to check,  It tasted salty and we were satisfied we were not being scammed.  After this fairly dark and mundane guided tour, we saw what was the most impressive highlight of the tour – the underground chapel. 

A huge room, still used today for special concerts wit fantastic chandeliers and an altar were housed 200 metres underground.  With everything made of either salt or wood due to the corrosion sustained by having any metal around, the place had a stunning ashen colour. 

Our tour concluded, we were led past some more of the same exhibitions and told that the mine has not been commercially operational for a good few decades, yet tourists were allowed to visit the mine as far back as the late 19th Century!  Dreading the steep stair-climb to exit, we were taking to a small lift shaft and crammed in to be taken to the top.  Why the shaft is only operational to leave the mines is beyond me.  It was a bit like Russia in reverse – easy to leave, tiring to enter.

Satisfied that our Krakow City Tour experience was satisfactory, we retired to our hostel after a final Polish meal at our favourite Polish log-cabin restaurant.  However, what we didn’t know is that there was a swanky formal restaurant underneath the self-service one we frequented, with live lounge piano music.  Beer in hand, we were turned away from this establishment and sent upstairs with the other commoners.  Still, we enjoyed our meal.  When we got back to the hostel, a quick shower was in order and after leaving my shower gel and shampoo in the bathroom for narry an hour while I wrote this post, I returned and they were gone.  Hostel theft, it’s not big and it’s ot clever.  Anyway, a storm’s a-coming along with an eleven hour train journey to Germany.  Farewell, Poland!

Forgive me, but understandably – I hope – this will not really be a blog full of the usual witticisms and humour as the subject matter really demands respect.

Today was the day we had been looking forward to but not wanting, we were to visit the place that has adorned so many photos, films and textbooks, the centre of activity for the Nazi’s “Final Solution”: the Auschwitz-Birkenau Concentration Camp.

As you more than likely already know, this was the dual purpose labour and extermination camp. I’ll try and recount my thoughts and feelings on the day rather than the history that can be found on a multitude of websites & in multiple books.

We’d bought our tickets, got up early and boarded the bus at 0800.  We arrived at the first part of the triple-sited camp, Auschwitz I. What struck me was that the place did not remind me of any of the things that I’d seen in books. All the buildings were brick and there was a tourist centre between a café and a shop.

Originally Polish barracks, pre-war, that the Nazi had converted these brick buildings into their death camp. These have all now had their interiors painted in the interests of restoration and they’re now full of exhibitions dedicated to various aspects of camp life. The barbed wire and guard posts however, remain intact around the perimeter.

Some of these exhibitions were just a variety of pictures, and although poignant they were sometimes hard to associate with. The more moving exhibits were those tangible artifacts, such as two tonnes of human hair.  Removed by the Nazis after women were killed, the hair was sold on for manufacture into felt, rope and socks.

The thousands and thousands and thousands of paris of shoes belonging to the slain – big and small, adult and children’s sizes were also on display. These objects were obtained by either by confiscation from the 25% of the people that arrived who were considered suitable for work, or it was pillaged from the other 75% that were considered unsuitable for labour and sent straight to the gas chambers.

It took us just under two hours to complete the tour of this part of the camp. culminating in a visit to the sole remaining extermination ‘morgue’. This had been a converted munitions dump and the only reason it had not been destroyed during the Soviet’s liberation was because the Nazis had also used it as an air raid shelter. For me, this was the most horrific part of the trip. We walked into one room that was where the victims had been told to undress for their ’shower’. This then led into the gas chamber.

A bare room, with nothing out of the ordinary apart from the big doors and the holes in the roof, for locking the innocent people in and for pouring in the crystals of Cyclon-B. Knowing the way that tens of thousands of innocent people, like you or me, had perished in this unassuming room left a horrible, indescribable impression on you. These people simply had their lives, hopes and dreams destroyed by stepping into a simple room.

It’s a feeling that makes you ill when you think about the sheer terror of what went on, what it was like when the doors were shut and when people began to really understand what was about to happen, to fear the inevitable, and then to die.

After this room was the ‘crematorium’: industrial sized ovens used for nothing other than destroying the evidence someone’s body had ever existed.

The overall impression Auschwitz I had on me was just an understanding and repulsion of how industrialised the whole killing process was. It could have been any industrial setting – processes are analysed, evaluated and then streamlined, to add more efficiency to this killing factory.

After the tour of this part of the tour, the bus took us to Auschwitz II – Birkenau. This is the lesser visited part of the camp 3km away; the section people will have seen pictures of: the Gate of Death, where the railway tracks led straight up to a platform (the Judenramp) where the poor prisoners were again separated into suitable for work and those for suitable for nothing other than immediate extermination.

The majority of the camp was destroyed by the fleeing Nazis in an attempt to cover the evidence of their crimes, including four other purpose built gas-chambers (the one we had seen in Auschwitz I had the smallest capacity). What did survive was a number of wooden and brick huts, the main guard house and the chimneys from the huts.

We saw inside the wooden huts – originally built as stables – and were shocked. Hundreds of people were fitted into conditions not suitable for animals. Many cramped onto tiny bunks – I’m sure you’ve all seen the pictures but it’s so much more terrifying in person.

If Auschwitz I gave a sense as to how streamlined, well-prepared and planned the whole operation was, Birkenau showed the scale. From the watch tower you can see across the whole camp – all 175 hectares of it – and see all the chimneys left from the huts. There are a lot of chimneys, The place is truly massive.

Leaving Birkenau and returning to Krakow on the coach, we had a chance to reflect upon what we’d seen that day. We had a massively enhanced appreciation of what had been done to people that had no reason to deserve it (as if anyone deserves such treatment?). Along with this, we felt an anger that anyone could do such a thing to anyone and that so many involved had almost got away with it. Not only that, but there are people who still deny this event ever happened.  In all honesty, I can’t really express my full thoughts on a blog, there’s just too much that goes through your head – it’s overwhelming.

All we can say is, that to truly understand, you have to go there, but even then you will still struggle – as I do – to grasp the sheer scale of the atrocities committed.  The numbers boggle the mind, but it certainly gives you an appreciation at the suffering and will make you hope above almost all else that such a thing is never allowed to occur again.

We didn’t do anything else that day, after arriving back to Krakow at about 1500.  We sat in the Old Square, we had a late lunch and went to an Italian restaurant for dinner – all the while we reflected about what we’d seen and how we’d seen it.  A sunny day in the Polish countryside never seemed so sombre.

Today was the day we made the fabled transition from buses to trains.  Today was the day we were certified Inter-Rail Global Travellers once more!  We thought it’d never come, but through the Eurolines Baltic Express and the Russian border officials, nothing could now stop us getting on a train at 0915 from Warsaw Central Station.

In keeping with our intrepid-travelling roots, we were to kick it up a notch and visit our second destinations in Poland.  Heading south, we took a three hour journey, in a modern train, where we could stretch our legs and have our huge bags crammed by our sides.  Luckily, there was only a mother-daughter combo to hardly fill our six-person compartment, and we busily scribbled away on our reserved seats.

Enduring the torture of no free wi-fi, we filled our time reading and listening to our respective Apple-branded mp3 players.  I’d brought only one book with me, specifically for this journey: The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas.  With a visit to Auschwitz on the agenda for the following day, I thought I’d read John Boyne’s 2006 best-selling tale of Holocaust literature.  Written as a fable, and in the style of a children’s story, I’d finished the novel two hours later, haunted.

A short while dozing later, I’d recovered and we were in the centre of Krakow.  Going up some stairs and down some others and through a maze of a modern shopping centre, we stumbled into the medieval heart of the small town.

But something was wrong.  Either we’d learned to speak fluent Polish or there were a lot of English speakers around.  Sadly, it turned out to be the latter, and the small town was over-run by tourists.  We found our way to our hostel briskly enough, which appeared to be above a club on one of the main Old Town thoroughfares.  Upon hearing the (now-to-be-expected) news that we couldn’t check in for another hour and a half, we set off in search of lunch.

Picking a Polish ‘milk-bar’ canteen, we ate some meat-filled pierogi (dumplings/ravioli) and returned to ‘Tutti Frutti’ hostel.

Having spent far less than the 6-8hour pre-requisite amount of sightseeing, this was no time for rest.  Having a quick chat with some of our English room-mates, and seeing Jezz (who we met in Vilnius), we hit the Old Town square again.

The main attractions of the Stare Miasto square are: the Cloth Hall (the Sukiennice, the Mariacki Church with its Gothic spire and the copper-domed Woiciech/Adalbert’s Church (the oldest in Krakow).

With the Cloth Hall now housing nothing more than your standard tourist-tat market and the Oldest Church In Krakow fairly basic, it was up to the Mariacki Church to pique our interest. Inside is the stunning triptych high altar, built around 1480, which is a magnificent wood carving depoicting the Virgin Mary among the apostles.

Heading up the Church Tower for our standard set of town-panorama shots, we were greeted at the summit by one of the seven local firemen who play a sombre melody entitled the hejnal every hour.

Why do they do this, I hear you ask?  Well, legend has it that during one of the Tartar raids in the thirteenth-century, a gard watching from that very tower saw the invaders approaching and blew his readily-available trumpet, only for his alarm to be inconveniently cut short by an arrow through the throat.  Therefore, every hour, these firemen play the first segment of this melody, stopping at the point where the guard was supposed to have met his demise.

Beer o’clock soon reared its thirsty head, and we set ourselves down in the square oto enjoy a cold one. Or two.

After this hops-based ritual, it was soon time for dinner, and we ventured to a delightful little Polish self-service restaurant, designed like a (genuine?) Polish cabin.

With a plate full of indigenous pork and potatoes, and some more beer, we ate and drank well before heading for another night-wander through Stare Miasto, accompanied by another travel-favourite: ice cream.

While casually debating deep philosophical questions such as the meaning of life and whether or not we ever want to go back to Russia, we were approached by what, on first impression, appeared to be a homeless man.  However, this remarkably clean-and-healthy-looking gentleman with a long white beard turned out to be none other than an English-speaking guitar-playing Swedish vegan hippie, travelling through Europe on his bicycle.

We gladly held conversation for a little while, enjoying his anecdotes aboout sleeping outside the castle, among nature (in the only true ‘million-star hotel’), but made our excuses to leave when he talked of Nazi-like atrocities committed in the present day.  Typical Surreyites, never wanting to hear about unsettling things happening under our very noses.  Not true.  When we thought he’d be talking about human rights abuses, corrupt politicians and world poverty, we were intrigued.  When he started harping on about extreme animal rights and veganism, we switched off.

With a day trip to Oswiecim-Brzezinka necessitating an early start, we headed to the hostel for an early night.  With the hostel situated on top of a thriving bar/club, however, our ‘early night’ was due to be a little delayed.