**Disclaimer: As the post title should indicate, this is kind of a downer of a post. Don’t say I didn’t warn you. Only for a bit, though — then it perks up towards the end.**

Sunday July 11th, we got up early and got our bags packed, then took them to the train station and stuffed them in a locker so that we could pick up our train reservation and tickets for Prague, and then hop a train to Oscwiecim (the town where Auschwitz is) before taking the night train to Prague.

We hadn’t looked at the train schedules in advance, because we’d looked before, and there was always a train an hour to Oscwiecim. Well, for some reason there wasn’t today (maybe because it was Sunday?) so we ended up at the bus station behind the train station, to take a bus. While the bus was on the highway, we encountered a very recent traffic accident blocking the road (and “highway” is being generous–there wasn’t even a single line dividing the two halves of the road.) The bus couldn’t squeeze by, and the cops on the scene didn’t have any word as to when it’d be cleared, so the bus driver decided to backtrack and take a different route. And I discovered something. The frustrating part about having GPS is that when the bus driver is going THE WRONG WAY and he doesn’t speak English and you don’t speak Polish, there’s really nothing you can do except for sit and watch him go the wrong way. At one point we were going down a farm road in the middle of a bunch of fields and NOTHING ELSE, and the road was so narrow that branches from trees were hitting us on both sides as well as the top of the bus. The driver pulled over four different times to ask for directions (including one time on that farm road, much to the farmer’s bemusement from which the driver got directions.)

So we ended up getting to Auschwitz over an hour late. This kind of screwed our schedule up, unfortunately, as we had to leave by 6 to catch our train to Prague, and we ended up cutting our visit short, which I was kind of bummed about. But at the same time, we kind of saw enough, you know?

I took almost no pictures. Two with my phone, and maybe four or five more with my regular camera (I’ll post those later, of course.)

Auschwitz is actually three sites–Auschwitz I (the original camp that was mostly used for political prisoners), Auschwitz II (Auschwitz-Birkenau) which is the most notorious one where most of the atrocities occurred, and Auschwitz III, a labor camp that we didn’t see (and I don’t think is on display.) We actually went to Auschwitz II first, since between the hours of 10AM and 3PM the only way you can access Auschwitz I is via a guided tour, which is not only expensive, but not something either of us was interested in. Seriously, who wants to be rushed through something like that?

Auschwitz II is outside the town a couple of miles, so we had to take a free shuttle bus over there. There’s really not much left–the main building where the main gates were, a few of the barracks, and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria (ruins because the Nazis blew them up when it became clear that the Soviets were going to come in and liberate the camps.)

I had a really hard time grasping things at Auschwitz-Birkenau. I think partly it’s because so little remains, but also partly because we’re so used to seeing everything as black-and-white pictures, and here we were in full-color on a 90+ degree summer day, with everything around us green and leafy. In my head, concentration camps are always in black and white and it’s always winter, because that seems to be how it is in the pictures I’ve seen. Heck, even in the pictures where there’s no snow, since they’re in black and white, it’s hard to get a sense of the vibrancy and reality of things.

So I decided to turn the two pictures I took into black and white shots… maybe you can see what I mean.

Remains of barracks at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

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Same picture, turned grayscale and some other tinkering done to it. This is how I picture it, ya know?

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The blue sky, puffy white clouds, and green trees just don't jive with this infamous sign over the gate at Auschwitz I.

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Yeah, this picture is about how it should look. Incidentally, did you know that some indescribably stupid people stole this sign last winter with the intention of selling it to a collector? When it was recovered, they'd cut it into three pieces, ostensibly to smuggle it out of the country. Wow. Just... yeah.

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After Auschwitz-Birkenau, it was after 3, so we headed back to Auschwitz I. That camp is MUCH better-preserved. The majority of the buildings were brick rather than wood, and they’d turned a lot of them into museums on different topics, so we wandered through them with the time we had remaining. Again, looking at the buildings themselves, I had a really hard time grasping what went on there… but looking at some of the exhibits made some things come alive. They have one room that’s full of nothing but hair the Nazis cut off of the women. It’s dusty and all looks gray and clumped and matted together, but here and there you can see braids, and that caught me. It was hard to look at the buildings and see what’d happened there, but for some reason, all I had to do was look at a braid and envision the woman braiding it for the last time. There was another room just full of shoes, including a large display of just thousands of children’s shoes. That was another really really difficult one for me. There was another one full of clothes. One full of brushes — hair brushes, toothbrushes, clothing brushes, shaving brushes. One of suitcases, suitcases plastered with the name and address label of the owner, and in many cases also covered in stickers from exotic locations to which the owner had traveled. New York City. Paris. Istanbul.

Ya know, I’ve been to the Holcaust Museums in LA and Washington DC. I’ve seen similar displays of personal artifacts, and those definitely affected me. But there was something about seeing the ones at Auschwitz and knowing that this was where they were brought originally — that they were brought there for their intended purposes, and not shipped there after the fact for the purpose of a museum exhibit… something about that hit me pretty hard.

We saw other places where horrible atrocities occurred (the camp prison, the excecution yard) but nothing came to life like room after room of personal belongings. That’s what resonated with me, and is lodged in my brain.

Like I said earlier, we had to leave an hour before the museum closed, so we didn’t have time to see everything I wanted to see… but at the same time it was enough.

***HERE ENDS THE SERIOUS PART OF THE POST. ENOUGH ALREADY.***

We hopped a (very very crowded) bus home (we got the last two seats on the bus — the 15 or so people who boarded after us ended up standing for the almost two-hour ride back.) Once we got back, we retrieved our bags from the locker and headed to the mall next to the train station so we could eat dinner and I could finish postcards. It was here that I discovered something quite amazing.

McDonald’s in Poland serves CHICKEN CURRY BURGERS.

DUDE. WHY DON’T WE HAVE THESE AT HOME. SERIOUSLY.

Ok, granted it’s not as good as actual chicken curry, but for a chicken burger, it was PRETTY GOOD. Just spicy enough without being so spicy that it’d scare people off, and that lovely curry flavor… mmmmmm. Where can I start a petition to get these at home???

Oh, and I can’t remember if I’ve talked about McDonald’s here or just on Facebook, so I’ll explain here for posterity. While I’m all about eating local food while traveling, McD’s in foreign countries are good for two reasons. First, as you saw with my previous example, it’s fun to see what the local menu contains that the American menu doesn’t. So far I’ve had a raspberry “summer shake” (quite good!) and a burger that I tried in Zagreb called a McCountry, which was like a Big Mac only with this very mustardy dijon sauce. I didn’t realize what it was before I bought it, I just wanted to try it. I like mustard, but this was too much mustard for me. I couldn’t finish it, and neither could John. Oh well. I’ve seen this same burger in Poland and in Hungary (where it was called the McFarm… I’m not sure why, but then again, I’m not sure why it’d be called the “McCountry” either.)

The second reason McDonald’s in foreign countries are great? They ALL have FREE WIFI. And they’re huge — much bigger (more seating) than pretty much any American McD’s I’ve seen. So they’ve become, for John and I on this trip, a meeting spot for when we split up to do our own thing, and also a waiting room when we’re waiting for a train. Heck, it’s a lot nicer than the train station, and you can get a soda and sit there for two hours and no one will hassle you (unlike at a cafe.)

We headed to the train about 20 minutes before it was supposed to leave and found our train car. Have I mentioned yet how night trains work in Europe? It’s really very cool! You board a car that’s going to your destination, but the other cars on the train may be going to different destinations. In the middle of the night, you make one or more stops where your car (or the other cars) is unlinked from the train and hooked to a different train that’s going where you want to go. It’s really nifty!

Anyway, so I hand the conductor our reservation, tickets, and rail passes. Let me explain how that works. We have railpasses, but for some trains (including overnight trains) you also have to purchase a reservation (fairly cheap on day trains, more expensive on night trains) so that you’re guaranteed somewhere to sit. Also, our rail passes weren’t valid for Poland, so we had to purchase tickets from Krakow to the Polish border, and then our passes would be good once we crossed into the Czech Republic. So we had four pieces of paper total — the reservation slip, two tickets, and the railpass. I hand all of this over to the conductor for our car, and he shakes his head and says no, that the reservation and tickets aren’t valid until the NEXT night.

WHAT.THE.HECK.

I looked closely at them for the first time, and sure enough, he was right — they were printed for July 12th. I thought back to that morning, and how the woman who’d printed them had JUST gotten to work — we were her first customers of the day, in fact.

I looked at John, and looked at the time. We had less than 15 minutes before the train was going to leave, and the international ticket counter was on the far opposite end of the station (pretty much as far opposite from where we were standing as we could get) and down and up a couple of sets of stairs (since you have to go underneath the tracks to get to the platforms.) I’m glad I chose to wear my shoes that day rather than my sandals! I left John with all of the bags and took off running, clutching the tickets and the passes.

I got to the counter, completely winded, and was shocked to see that, almost 12 hours later, it was the same woman who’d sold me the passes that morning!! I managed to gasp out our dilemma, and her response was, “Yes, I remember you. Did I really put that as the date? I know you wanted them for tonight.” No apology. She got a new reservation printed out, but handed me back cash and told me we’d need to buy the tickets on board the train. I didn’t quite understand it, but I took it and ran, literally. I sprinted back to the train and we grabbed our bags and got back in line and handed everything to the conductor outside the train door with less than five minutes to spare.

Right before the train left, the conductor came into our compartment looking for us — he wanted our rail passes, and he needed 5 more Euros, since it costs more to buy tickets on the train than in the station (which seemed really unfair to me, since the ticket woman was the one who screwed up in the first place anyway!) He said he’d take payment in Euro or Zloty (Polish currency.) We were out of both currencies — we haven’t been anywhere on the Euro since Montenegro (FIVE COUNTRIES AGO) and we’d tried to use up all of our Zloty so we didn’t have extra left. After dumping out all the small pockets of John’s and my backpacks, we located a 5 Euro bill that had somehow escaped detection. This, however, left our rail passes. The problem was that I’d already given them to him, and he insisted I hadn’t.

At this point I was TOTALLY freaking out. I’d already sprinted across the train station and back to get the reservation changed, it was hotter than hell outside and inside the station, and now he was telling me we never gave him our rail passes (which I KNOW we did, and which are NOT replaceable if we lose them.) John’s yelling at me to calm down and think about where I might have put the passes, I’m yelling back that I know I gave them to him, he’s yelling back that the conductor doesn’t have them, and our compartment companions are watching this in bewilderment.

Finally I go into the conductor’s berth and refuse to leave until he goes through the pile of tickets and railpasses. Lo and behold, there are our passes!!! AAARRRGGGGHHHHH.

I go back into our compartment and want to just curl into a little ball and cry out of sheer relief. We’re on the train, and I didn’t lose our passes. As I go to empty my pockets so that I can stretch out on the bed, I realize that the postcards are still in them. I’d meant to put them in the mailbox on the platform, and in the chaos, I TOTALLY forgot. GAH. Every time we stop for the rest of Poland, I hang my head out the train window to look at the platform and see if I see a mailbox… Nope. Sigh.

So some of you will be getting postcards from Poland when I get home and can stuff them into envelopes. Oh well, at least they have stamps on them. :-p

The other two guys in our compartment were pretty cool. They were two Swedish architecture students who were spending a couple of weeks traveling around Europe, and we talked for several hours, until the Spanish gals in the compartment next door banged on our wall for the third or fourth time (since it was around 1:30 AM and they probably wanted us to go to sleep, even though we were talking fairly quietly.)

Sonne and their traveling mascot. Apparently they put him into pictures at random. I SOOO love that idea -- I wish I'd done something similar on this trip!

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I was miserably hot, and of course at this point our train was stopped in a station waiting for another train for something like 45 minutes, so there was no airflow and no lovely white noise to put me to sleep, so I didn’t fall asleep until well after 2. Ugh. I still like night trains, though, even though it was A THOUSAND DEGREES IN THERE.

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