Krakow

(3 - 9 September)
Well we did quite a bit in Krakow, although a fair bit of it involved wandering about in the rain. We were there for a whole week, which is the longest we've been stationary since early June, and will probably be the longest we're somewhere until early November.

Krakow has the largest medieval town square in Europe apparently. This is half of it, the clothmarket building is in the middle of the square.


Sorry for the rain in all the pictures, but the only fine day we went to Auschwitz (more on that later).

Also sorry for the darkness of this picture, but we'd been the largest gothic cathedral, in Seville, so a photo of the largest gothic altar was necessary (this in a church on the town square):

The church, St Mary's Basilica, also has a trumpeter who plays all around its tallest tower every hour on the hour, all day and all night. Very impressive. We went to see him many times...

We spent our first couple of days in Krakow camping in the rain, before Joanna's parents flew over to join us, and convinced us we'd be better off in a nice hotel. We hadn't done too much sight-seeing before then as we attended to some admin, and wanted to wait to see things with Joanna's folks.

After we'd shown them the wet town square, we managed to make a trip to Wawel Hill, which is the spiritual heart of Poland for the religious and atheists alike, apparently. It has the cathedral where most of the Polish Kings, Queens and Heros were buried from way back in the 13th century onwards. And it also has the main palace from when Krakow was the capital.
Hill:


Palace:


It was raining of course:



In the cathedral there is King Sigmund's Bell:

We went to the inn where the Bell ringers have gone after ringing it for the past few hundred years - they each have their own numbered tankards. And they serve nice food there too.

As we said before, the only (vaguely) sunny day we decided we couldn't handle the sudden cheeriness and went to Auschwitz.

Due to a slight wrong turn we ended up at the Birkenau (Auschwitz II) camp first, which was the death camp where most people were killed.


About 1.5 million people were murdered there, almost 90% Jews. The scale is all pretty hard to comprehend. Auschwitz was the only camp that they tattooed prisoner numbers onto their bodies as they were killing in such volumes it was hard to keep track any other way. They think 1.1 million went to the gas chambers (with the scale increasing until the end of the camp - particularly as Hungarian Jews started arriving in numbers in late 1944); the rest were worked to death on starvation rations.


This is the inside of the gate to Birkenau that would have been seen as victims were getting off the trains for "selection" - where about 90% (including virtually all women & children) were selected for death in the 4 gas chambers.


After a long old wander around Birkenau, past the huts where Mengel & other doctors did hideous experiments and other nightmares, we went back to the main camp, Auschwitz I, actually in the Polish town of Osciewim - although all the locals had been forced out. This was better built as it had been a Polish barracks (at Birkenau they built wooden huts of a design intended for a few dozen horses but housed hundreds of people instead), but living conditions were still fairly horrendous.


In Auschwitz I is the museum, filled with horrifying things like 2 tonnes of human hair, all the confiscated shoes, brushes, combs etc of the gassed victims. There's also the wall where shooting executions were done, the parade ground where the prisoners were forced to stand at attention for up to 12 hours in a day, and the cells where prisoners were sentenced to starve to death. It's all very sobering.

Ben was probably a bit naughty taking this photo of his mother-in-law going into the main camp's gas chmaber:


The next day, to cheer us up, it of course rained. But it was National Dachshund Day (it's always an occassion when we show up):


And just for good measure another couple of pretty Krakow buildings; the Florian gate:


and a church with the Twelve Apostles out front:


And then it was time for Ma & Pa MacKenzie to go home. It was great having them over for a few days. Although after getting excited planning family visits to NZ with them it was bit hard getting travelling again. But we're back into the swing of things now. We're in Latvia, having made it in and out of Russia & raced through Lithuania. But we'll catch up a bit more on the blog whilst we're here in Riga, we plan to take things a bit easier the next couple of days...