My arrival in Warsaw was closely followed by my parents and sister, who flew from LAX through Moscow on a route that passed quite close to the North Pole. We spent the latter part of that day settling in. The rest of the family was really jet lagged. They’d traversed nine time zones, while I’d only crossed one. In the afternoon of the next day, we walked around Warsaw. The first thing we chanced upon was the former Gestapo prison in the Warsaw Ghetto. There was a memorial there to the thousands who were killed. Out rented apartment was in fact built by the Soviets within the former ghetto.
We spent the next four hours in the rain, but Warsaw was beautifully decorated for Christmas.
The following morning, we were up early at the beginning of a very long day. We took the train to Krakow and then a bus to the Auschwitz concentration camp. We spent most of our time at Auschwitz I, the original camp and a former army barracks. The Nazis used the lessons they learned here to construct the much more “efficient”, purpose-built camp at Birkenau nearby.
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| The cell where St. Maximilian Kolbe was starved, and later executed |
With little time left to spare before closing and our onward train, we took the bus to Birkenau. I was completely awestruck by its scale. With 20 minutes of brisk walking, we weren’t able to make it to the crematoria at the back of the camp and had to turn back. The camp is almost a kilometre square and it had a capacity of 100,000.
We left a little before closing, with yet another sprint to make the bus on time. We spent the evening in Katowice, and caught a sleeper just after midnight, bound for Prague.
