Katowice, Poland and Auschwitz I and II.

Two weekends ago, my friend Alyssa and I decided to drift a little bit off the beaten study abroad track and go to Katowice, Poland for the weekend. We went with the goal of touring Auschwitz, which is about 40 minutes from Katowice, but stayed Friday-Monday. While my previous weekend had been full of bustling shoppers, tourists, pretty streets, subway systems, and expensive EVERYTHING, Katowice was absolutely nothing like that.

Apparently most tourists coming to Poland to visit Auschwitz stay in Krakow, and as a result, Katowice was possibly the least tourist city I have ever been to. It’s fairly industrial, and for those reading from my hometown, the outskirts look startlingly similar to the older manufacturing parts of Rockford. Since we are students doing everything on the tightest budget possible, we stayed in a hostel in that area of the city that was actually remarkably nice and very comfortable.

It not being a tourist city, the language barrier in Katowice was definitely a big problem. We had both noticed that people in Poland tended to wear harsh expressions around on the streets and were kind of victims of the RBF (gross overgeneralization, I know, but it really is true that Americans smile way more than a lot of other countries on average. I’m also the biggest smiler ever, so allow me this skewed perception), so I was a bit worried people would snap at us for being such ignorant Americans (which I’m realizing more and more I really am). My friend ended up pulling out her phone a few times and typing into Google Translate just to communicate with the front desk at our hostel or to order food in a restaurant. However, everyone we met was actually super friendly under their sour exteriors! People went out of their way to help us when we asked, interpreted menus, and made sure we were comfortable.

The best thing about Poland was definitely the price, since the US dollar is fairly valuable in terms of the PLN. Our first night we went to a relatively high-end restaurant and got a steak dinner for approximately $16 USD, which felt almost like cheating! Our waitress recommended another Polish dish to us that I can only (inaccurately) describe as somewhere between a pizza and a quesadilla and some other delicious thing, but that was amazing too!

Taking advantage of the inexpensive prices, we did a bit of shopping our second day in Katowice, exploring the town center and shopping mall. Food was not something I expected to be a highlight of this trip, but we ate surprisingly well the whole time. We stopped for brunch in hip little cafe/coffee shop, where I got a (real!) polish sausage and a bunch of other stuff that was kind of a mystery but also delicious. The pizza in Poland also proved to be the best pizza I’ve had outside of Rockford, which I have no explanation for. Unfortunately, the language barrier struck us again at lunch, and I ended up with peanut butter in my smoothie, causing me to have an allergic reaction and be kind of the worst the rest of the day. We also witnessed an all-out brawl in the street on the way back to our hostel, which was scary and also confusing because it was unclear who was what side.

The next morning, we got up early to meet our van to Auschwitz. We had prearranged with a tour company to pick us up at our hostel and drive us to each part of the camp, which turned out to be totally worth it both financially and logistically. Once we got there, we joined an English speaking tour group starting in the main camp.

~This is one of those experience I’ll never really be able to describe effectively, but I will at least try. However, if you ever get the chance to visit Auschwitz, do it. It’s the only way to get a sense of the magnitude of what really occurred there, and it is beyond impactful.~

The entrance to the main camp displays the slogan “Work Sets You Free” in German and is the main gate you often see in famous pictures of the camp. This made it immediately recognizable just where we were standing, and the weight of it all hit pretty immediately. Everything was lined in barbed wire, and everything was original except the occasional signs telling tourists what once occurred in every building. This original part of Auschwitz was actually not constructed just as a concentration camp, but was first a military base. This made sense because the organization of the blocks, the landscaping, and the exteriors of the buildings were oddly…nice. However, each building would have been crammed with about 700 residents who slept on dirt floors, threadbare pads, and eventually two or more to a wooden bunk as the war progressed.

There were countless exhibits that pretty much slapped us in the face with the scale of the crimes at Auschwitz. One room was filled to the brim with shoes that had been stolen from victims upon their arrival. The room was entirely stuffed, but the scary thing was I knew it was only a small representation of the actual number of victims. A similar room was dedicated to hair, though that part was so personal and heartbreaking that they asked us not to photograph the area out of respect.

I think what really struck me about the whole experience was the psychology of it all..from both sides. The Nazis structured the camp to be not just a death factory, but a place of ultimate torture. It’s unimaginable that such extreme collective cruelty could exist, but it truly did. There were buildings for medical experiments on prisoners, starvation cells, cells where prisoners were forced to stand all night, gallows for public hanging, and countless other anecdotes of entirely random acts of cruelty, not to mention the actual gas chambers. Perhaps the worst part of it all was that many prisoners were made to believe until the very end that they were moving to a new country to start a new life. Our tour guide really emphasized this point throughout the tour, saying how the Nazis even went as far last to ask prisoners to remember where they hung their clothes before going into the “showers” (gas chambers) so that they could come and collect them afterwards.

The second part of the tour took place in Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This part of the camp was truly a death factory, with two huge gas chambers, and the living conditions were unspeakable. They had us stand on the railway where the Jewish prisoners would have gotten off the train and then had us walk the exact route they would have taken straight back to the gas chambers. It was an experience I will never forget. Again, I was thinking about the minds of the people involved. Birkenau was built by prisoners from Auschwitz I, who undoubtably knew from experience what they were constructing and just how it would be used. But of course, they had no choice. What that must have been like, I cannot imagine.

I expected Auschwitz to exist in complete desolation, assuming no one would ever want to build anything near such a memory, but I was surprised that people actually live across from Birkenau. Again, it’s interesting to think about the minds of the Polish people in that situation. They do profit from a tourist industry that is built on some of the cruelest history that has ever occurred. While they weren’t the ones who perpetrated the crimes, that could still feel a bit weird. At the same time, it is important for people to go tour these camps and to be impacted by them in that unique way so that such cruelty is never permitted to exist again. And they definitely don’t commercialize it beyond what is necessary. Anyway, just food for thought.

As you can imagine, the rest of our trip wasn’t very noteworthy in comparison. I think the memorial plaque on the ruins of one of the gas chamber in Birkenau said it best: “For ever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity. Where the Nazis murdered about one and a half million men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of Europe.”

Thanks for reading,

Summer

Below is one picture of Katowice and then many of both Auschwitz I and II.