Krakow: The Salt Mines

Ok, enough depression for one trip!  On to the Wieliczka Salt Mines!!  We stopped by here after our disturbing trip to Auschwitz and enjoyed ourselves.  So...these super old sat mines (built in the 13th century), located in the small town of Wieliczka outside of Krakow, produced table salt continuously until 2007 - one of the oldest salt mines still operating!  You get to see a ton of the cavernous rooms and tunnels, how the miners would mine the salt, AND dozens of statues a couple of chapels, and a huge cathedral that have been carved out of the rock salt by the bored miners.  The tour is close to 2.5 hours, with an additional hour of waiting in lines to get back up to the surface, so be prepared if you come here.  Here are some highlights!

This was taken when I bent over the stair rail and saw how far down we had to go.  It looks infinite.

Same pic, different lighting.  Yowza!  Something like 53 flights of stairs to climb down.  Not recommended for those with vertigo.

This is a huge block of rock salt, which is gray and actually resembles unpolished granite.  

Humongous wooden beams to hold the walls and "ceilings" up.

A beautiful wooden door carved into the side of a wall of salt.  I kept thinking about the mines of Moria from Lord of the Rings throughout this whole thing and
"It's not a mine...it's a TOMB!"

This was a carving that depicted an old Polish folktale about a princess throwing her engagement ring deep into the mine when another miner found it.  Those are soldiers in the background.

More salt - looks different than the gray graphite salt though.  Hmm.

Tunnels!

King Kazimierz - big time Polish king from the 1300s.  They freakin love this guy.  

A salt gnome!  Or something.

The huge cathedral carved out of salt!  Even the chandeliers are made of salt crystals.

Religious carvings and a Longhorn.

They also have a 3D salt carving of da Vinci's The Last Supper.  It's only 6 inches deep but it's pretty amazing.

Underwater lake!  It spooked me out thinking about the Inferi in Harry Potter. but I luckily didn't see any.
So many literary references in these mines!

Look!  A dragon!  Ahhhhhhhh

Ridiculously tall white wooden beams that go up farther than the eye can even see.

A salt mustache.  A saltstache.

They said you could lick the wall and taste the salt.  So I did.

After the 54 flights of stairs and after you wind your way through the tunnels for 2.5 hours, you have to get on a teeny tiny little elevator/wire cage that whisks you all the way back up to civilization.  They cram as many people as they can in it and my face was pressed to the metal wiring - and it was all a little too close for comfort after just being at Auschwitz.  If you have issues with claustrophobia then just close your eyes and breathe deeply and tell yourself it'll all be over soon!

It was a llloooonnnngggg ass day and we came back, changed, and headed to a fun restaurant recommended by our cutie driver, Kogel-Mogel.  It's a romantic little joint with classic Polish dishes and we loaded up on pierogi and duck!  Yum yum.

Pierogi!

Tourist.

My half a duck!

The Polish are also known for their vodka (or love of) so we stopped by the Rick Steves' recommended  Wodka Cafe Bar, a tiny, intimate little vodka bar that has a few seats downstairs and then a staircase directly on/over the bar with more tiny seats and benches upstairs. We made some friends and ordered a hazelnut vodka and a caramel vodka for dessert.  Strong but pretty darn good!

A couple vodkas later we crashed and burned back at our hotel, happy to sleep and forget the first part of the day ever happened!  Goodnight!

Auschwitz-Birkenau

Drew and I jetted off to Krakow, Poland for the bank holiday last weekend and let me just start by saying...Krakow is beautiful.  It's a wonderful, old, gorgeous city and everyone should go there.  But I think I'm done with the eastern European former Nazi/Communist anti-semitic countries for a little while.  Just for a bit.

Poland unfortunately has some of the same tragic history that Hungary has, but while we could feel the focus on the former Soviet presence in Budapest, Poland in turn is completely scarred by World War II.  We hardly heard a word about communism but heard an incredible amount about the Nazis.  Which...is understandable, as Poland is where the war actually started (with Hitler invading from the west and the Soviets invading from the east), and the fact that the most horrible death camp that existed is in their backyard.  

So today's post is not so happy, or uplifting, but I'm going in order of the trip and this was up first.  Sigh.

We got in Friday afternoon, walked around, took a cat nap, went out for an amazing dinner at Pod Barenem (probably our best meal of the trip!  Two thumbs up!), and hit the hay.

Saturday morning, our driver picked us up for a long day's journey into Poland for a trip to Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Salt Mines.  I had been dreading this part of the trip for weeks.  I couldn't actually go to sleep the night before, so anxious was I about visiting this horrible place.  I know it was something we had to do but it wasn't something I particularly wanted to do.  The place was PACKED and initially much less foreboding than I anticipated...it was actually a decent looking place and I told myself that "I can do this!"  There were children there, for crying out loud.  Anyway, the tour started.

You walk into the camp under this iconic sign, "Arbeit Macht Frei" - Work Makes You Free.

Then you basically wander along between the blocks, these pretty red buildings that don't look so bad on the outside but were actually terrible and horrible.  If you even made it that far, as a prisoner.  You stop along the way, listening to your tour guide tell you disturbing things about this death camp.

Several of the "blocks" were dedicated to different things.  Extermination.  Possessions.  Living Conditions.  Pictures of prisoners.
This room shows thousands of pairs of glasses.

Thousands of pots.  The Jews were told to bring all of their most valuable belongings with them, what they needed to start a new life.  They were LIED TO and their stuff was then taken after they were gassed.   It makes me sick to my stomach.

Baskets and suitcases.

The electric fence and watch tower.

This is a courtyard turned memorial between Blocks 10 and 11 where they shot several revolutionaries, musicians, politicians, intellectuals, leaders.  Not even Jewish ones.  Just people they thought were influential and could do potential harm to their cause.

One of the former gas chambers.

I took about a thousand pictures but I eliminated a lot of them for the blog.  Pictures and descriptions can't really do this place justice.  I think the most disturbing and upsetting part for me was a Block where they had hundreds of pictures of each inmate, like mug shots almost, and the men's heads and faces were all shaved, and the women's hair was short, and they all looked so hopeless.  I could hardly look at them without crying so I had to keep my head down through that part of it.  There were several Blocks that I just couldn't go into because it was too much for me to handle.  And the details the guide goes into...it's just sickening.  I'm not going to write about it but it literally makes you physically ill.  It was a long tour and I thought I'd never recover...but the clouds seem to lift after you leave Auschwitz and you become your normal (though slightly more disturbed) self again.

But wait!  There's more!  We then headed over with our guide to Birkenau, the camp they built a couple miles away to house and kill MORE people.  And let me just tell you...Auschwitz is a five star resort compared to Birkenau.

All that remains on the vast property are a couple of brick buildings, and the frames of some wooden barracks.  You can see the chimneys (that were never used, just for propoganda) of several of the houses still standing, but it's mostly just an enormous field of...ruins.  

They had the train tracks extended to come INTO the camp, so they could speed up the extermination process.  

This is a train car that would hold 80-100 people being brought to these camps.

Ruins of the gas chamber.

A Jewish group having some sort of ceremony here.  I think the only time Drew and I even cracked a smile was when we saw one of the guys grab a brick from the gas chamber ruins and hide it in his coat and attempt to walk off like he didn't just steal it.  Nice.

We got to go inside one of the barracks, and it was pretty grim.

The women would sleep on these wooden planks, usually 6-8 across.  And there would be no heating.  In the middle of a Polish winter.  Can you imagine?  Another thing that makes me sick.

We got back in the car and tried to compose ourselves, return to a state of normalcy, compartmentalize the depressing things we just saw, and shove them into a drawer in the back of our minds.  But now I'm having to open the drawer again to write about this and I DON'T LIKE IT.

One thing we noticed was that our Polish tour guide was NOT so pro-American/Britain/Allies as we thought they would be.  I think we so often pat ourselves on the back for being back-to-back World War champs and liberating the oppressed people of Europe, but the Poles don't see it this way.  Or at least this Pole didn't.  He would talk about how the "A-lies" knew that these atrocities were happening but did nothing to stop them.  And that the U.S. sold Poland to the Soviets when the war was over, "betraying [them] yet again."  We get all the glory but we did nothing to help the Jews or the Poles during the war.  So that was...a new perspective, one that I wasn't used to, because I'm a stereotypical American and think we're the heroes. But new perspectives are a good thing and I'm just now sorry that people feel that way about us.  And that we did/didn't do those things.  We did ask our guide at the end how he managed to do tours at Auschwitz, going over these upsetting facts and stories with people in great detail DAILY, and he said that he, along with most of the other tour guides, have relatives and family members that were murdered there.  So keeping them in mind and having a personal reason for not letting the world forget these atrocities certainly helps.  

We left there with sad and angry feelings, new perspectives, new information, and an even deeper hatred of Hitler.  Sorry not sorry.

In conclusion, I leave you with this quote from George Santayana, which was plastered all over the camp:

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.