Auswitch and Krakow

It was a seven hour trip maybe eight to Krakow. I've had better trips. We got into town late at night with no hostel booked, but we had no trouble finding one for at for one night. Everything was booked up for the next day though. No problem for me really as I wasn't in the mood for another city. I had it in my head that if I was going to spend 2 weeks in Poland, I would have to see Auswitch. Ali had already been to a concentration camp in Germany and it has sufficiently affected her, so I was on my own.
The weather in Krakow was miserable. Too bad because it's supposed to be the most beautiful city in all of Poland. Hitler didn't quite manage to destroy it despite his intentions. So I didn't really get any pictures of Krakow.
I didn't take any pictures at Auswitch either save one (seen here). It didn't seem right to be snapping away like some were. I simply had to take this one. Sound familiar? In fact there are so many allusions in today's events to the atrocities of the 2nd World War that it makes me sick. As a people we have learned nothing. This road of oblivious ignorance must be the result of poor education, poor memory or deliberate side tracking. Maybe all three.
Enough social commentary.
Auswitch was very moving. Walking along corridors where millions had been murdered, touching walls with bullet holes and seeing gas chambers was very disturbing. Seeing thousands of kilos worth of women's hair used to line Nazi jackets was sickening. Knowing that people had died in almost every area that I had stood in the camp was surreal.
In each of the barracks where seven to eight hundred people were held, there was a "presentation" depicting different parts of camp life. It was very disturbing to see how depraved and disgusting man can truly be. The Nazis had the intention of wiping out not just Jews (though it seems they were the priority) but the entire Polish race as well. Hitler had warehouses of stuff to use in a museum of an extinct race for the Jews, but wanted nothing of the Polish culture to remain at all. The methods used were disgusting. In the ghettos, starvation was used as it was cheaper than bullets or gas and was effective at destroying Polish moral who watched friends and family die of famine around them in the streets. Torture in the camps was disgusting and humilitation was a common tool as well. There was a film available in English, but I had seen enough. A film would simply have changed my perspective of all that I had seen and read to that point. I went back to Krakow feeling pretty low.
Despite our desire to split up, Alison and I had run into each other in line at the train station where I was buying my night train tickets to Budapest and she was considering going to the Slovak Republic to break up the trip a bit. She had been standing in front of me but I didn't recognize her for 5 minutes as I was being pestered by a beggar (again) and it took me a while to convince him to take off. It was funny because she turned around and I thought she looked familiar. I said her name, and she didn't recognize me either for a split second. We decided it was a sign to stick together a little while longer, and we both got tix for the night train to Budapest.