Poland in Winter

 

KRAKOW

**Anyone following this blog will know that yes, we are back to reality now, after arriving home in Newcastle over the weekend. It's less than a week until I return to finish off my Law degree, so writing this blog will be my bit of procrastination from all of that over the coming weeks....**

Three days filled with snow, dark history, small dumplings and our first taste of the backpacker-friendly East, our visit to Poland was something I'm definitely glad we did. When we first told people we were going to Krakow (confusingly pronounced 'Krak-ov') in the middle of winter they thought we were crazy. "It's like -15 degrees there in winter!". Lucky for us we managed to miss the most of the cold, with temperatures just below zero and some light snow that made the city look picture perfect.

We arrived on a late flight from London and spent three nights in the city, which was just enough time to see the main sights of town, take a daytrip to Auschwitz- Birkenau concentration camp, and also to sample some of the infamous nightlife that sees backpackers flocking to Krakow each year. The city centre itself is quite compact, which made it easy to see all of the sights in one day.

The main square by night

We joined a free walking tour (with an actual native Polish guide) through the Jewish quarter of Krakow, telling stories of how Poles from this area were persecuted during World War 2. We visited a square right on the edge of the Jewish ghetto that was used by the Nazis as an assembly point for the Jews, where they would routinely gather them before they took them to the nearby concentration camps. As the camps started to become full, selections were made in that very square and the weak, elderly or children were killed then and there on the spot. Today the square is marked as a memorial, and 68 different sized chairs are placed around the square to represent the 68,000 polish Jews killed from Krakow.

The chair memorial

On the tour we also visited the sight of Schindler 's Factory - made famous because of the movie Schindler's List. Now I haven't actually seen that movie, but our guide did a good job of explaining how the character of Schindler had been 'Hollywood-ised' in the movie. In the movie, Schindler is supposed to be this hero who 'saves the Jews' by hiding them in his factory, and then when they are taken to Auschwitz at the end he dramatically goes to the camp and demands for them to be released. In reality, our guide told us a story that made it seem like Schindler was a little more concerned with his self-preservation and the productivity of his factory than any great heroic gesture. Guess we'll have to watch the movie now just to see how much they changed the truth.

Our time in Krakow was a bit of a historical tour, especially since one of the main sights we were there to visit was Auschwitz. We joined a day bus tour that took us to visit both Auschwitz and the nearby Birkenau death camps, with a local guide taking us through all the old blocks and telling us what they were used for. The time in the concentration camp was such an unusual experience that it's really quite difficult to describe what it felt like when you were there. The sheer scale of people who were sent to those camps- Jews, poles, gypsies and homosexuals- was so hard to comprehend, especially when we knew that most of them never made it out.

The entrance to Auschwitz and the infamous words 'work makes you free'

But as if a number on the wall wasn't enough to represent all the lives that were lost, a big part of the Auschwitz exhibition are rooms full of things taken from the prisoners when they arrived. There's a display of all the suitcases that were taken from the people as soon as they stepped off the trains, a window of spectacles, and an entire display of shoes that were stripped off the prisoners and taken to 'Canada' (the name for the area where all of the stolen belongings from the prisoners were kept, since Canada was a prosperous place at the time).

But worst of all was a glass cabinet, about the length of a room, filled with human hair. The prisoners were all forced to shave their heads on arrival to the camps, a way to slowly strip any sense of identity these people once had. The Nazis then kept all of that hair- some was used to weave blankets and uniforms to sell in Germany, and the rest remains as a macabre reminder of just how many people were there. But as well as these rooms of personal objects, one of the most vivid parts of our visit was seeing for ourselves the remains of one of the gas chambers in Auschwitz. We walked down into this bunker-like room, cold with concrete walls. As soon as we walked in I noticed there were scratch marks from fingertips of people still on the walls. This part was definitely the most difficult sight to see as we stood in the very spot where thousands of people were murdered.

It's strange to describe how we felt after visiting Auschwitz. The day we went was pouring snow and our feet were frozen from walking in the cold, yet it felt wrong to complain about such a small inconvenience when you were surrounded by such a place as Auschwitz. Halfway in the visit we had a break where we snacked on a little bun thing, and even eating felt strange when so many people died in that place because of starvation. But despite being left with this strange feeling, the trip to Auschwitz was definitely worth it- as our guide said, people need to remember what happened there, what one man did to another, so that it does not happen again.

Despite spending some time confronting the heavier parts of history that took place in Poland, our time in the city wasn't all just doom and gloom. We managed to experience some of the best of the local food and entertainment places, thanks to some handy recommendations from the hostel we stayed at called Greg & Tom's. The hostel itself was great, set up over a couple of floors in an apartment building near the train station. For about €13 a night we got our own room in a little separate apartment shared with two other rooms, plus free breakfast and free dinner each night, and some super friendly staff members who had some good recommendations for food.

Polish food in general is nothing too exciting and is definitely food made for cold climates, with lots of warming carb-heavy meals and very little vegetables to be seen on the menus. We tried traditional Polish dumplings called Pierogi, which have a springy outer potato layer and are filled with either cheese, meat, spinach or mushrooms and sauerkraut. We also managed to find a good (and cheap) restaurant in the budget-friendly Jewish quarter called Marchewka z Groszkiem where we had lunch to thaw out from the cold. Proving just how carb-heavy the meals in Poland are, I had battered potato pancakes covered in a garlic and mushroom sauce- basically a chicken scnhitty without any chicken! But it sure did the job, as I wasn't cold after that feed.

Along with the food, we also got to check out some of the local nightlife spots which were awesome, so I could only imagine what it would be like in the summer time. We went to this one place I'm the Jewish quarter called Alchemia that is probably the best atmosphere I've ever seen in a place: when you first entered the room it was just a small, dimly lot room with candles flickering on each of the little tables. But then you walked through wardrobe doors to create this Narnia-like feeling and you would end up in another room altogether... Super cool.

Poland was somewhere that really surprised us- our main reason for visiting was something quite grim, and yet we managed to find a city that was worth a visit in its own right. From here, we moved West towards Prague, so more on that when my boredom kicks in.