Poland is our third ‘long-stay’ country, but this time, we’re spreading the love between three cities: Warsaw, Gdansk, Kraków, and back to Warsaw.

To be honest, we were concerned that moving each week would be tiresome, as travel days (packing, transit, unpacking) can be unpleasant and time consuming. But to our surprise, the travel days have been easy. We don’t have much luggage, and we share a large suitcase that holds all our winter gear (and we haven’t had to open that baby up yet). The inter-city trains are fast, comfortable, with table trays, phone chargers and restaurant cars.  We’ve easily found our apartments, and key locks and door codes have made check-in easy.

Our Kraków apartment is amazing, well except for the six flights of stairs (the name ‘Attic Apartment’ should have been a hint)!  But once upstairs, and with ragged breathing returned to normal, it’s a beautifully renovated space, with a funky wall mural, large openable skylights, and a huge bathroom with the biggest tub I’ve ever been in.  I never thought I’d say this, but the tub was almost too big (I could have drowned)!!

The Attic Apartment is about 2km from the old town, with a large shopping centre (with cinemas and about 20 restaurants) nearby, and the Vistula River beyond that.  It’s a very pleasant stroll into the old town with the river on our left, and the sights and sounds of Kraków on our right. But on the way home, after a big day (and occasionally a big night), we have fallen into the habit of picking up an e-scooter for the trip.

E-SCOOTER MISHAP

It was a matter of when, rather than if, we would have an e-scooter mishap.

After a late night with new friends, we searched for Lime Scooters to ride home on.  As tends to happen at the end of a busy day in the European Summer, every scooter we came across had less than 10% battery charge, not enough to get us home.  We finally found a single scooter with 35% charge, but could not find a second one. In all fairness, we didn’t look all that hard, my phone was already flat, and Rosco only had about 10% battery left, so we didn’t want to use valuable battery charge on a geo-search for charged scooters nearby.

We did what any exhausted, slightly inebriated couple in their mid-50s would do, and decided to double up, me driving, with Rosco clinging precariously on the back. I think my exact words were, “get on, I’ll give you a dinky” (Aussie slang from my childhood: to give someone a ride on your bike by letting him/her sit on the bar).

We had travelled no more than 2 metres before Rosco fell off the back, landing on his butt on the cobblestone street and causing some concerned passers-by to enquire about his welfare. Surprisingly, he was unhurt, and jumped back to his feet with the dexterity of a cat, firmly taking the scooter with the words “I’m driving”. In my defence, it was the combination of rapid acceleration and his clumsiness that caused the mishap. Rosco maintains I drove into a wall.  What really happened?  It will remain one of life’s great mysteries 😊.

So we set off again, Rosco driving and me as the caboose! It was terrifying. Cobbled streets are not fun on a scooter at the best of times, but in the middle of the night, in a ‘dinky’ situation, it was awful (Rosco, control freak, loved it).

There’s a weight limit for Lime Scooters, I’m not sure exactly what it is, but it’s probably something like 120kg. Let me tell you with complete certainty, that the Kacka+Rosco combination was well in excess of that limit. The 35% battery drained so fast. Rosco kept looking down to check how much battery was left. Every time he did that, the scooter veered off course, sometimes alarmingly close to the river edge.  Heroically, and having made it to the final pathway from the river to the shopping centre near our apartment, the scooter’s battery finally died. But we’d made it, and it was a mere 3 minute walk home.  Now to walk up 6 flights of stairs!

By the top of the stairs, there was only 3% battery charge left on Rosco’s phone, just enough for us to look up the complicated 9 digit code to get us into our apartment.  If his phone had died before this moment, we would have been sleeping in the hallway, which would have made for a far more amusing blog!

NEW FRIENDS

The reason we were out so late on a school night was on account of our new friends, Carly and Tim (and their kids George and Ruby). Having been on a day-long tour with them (more about that later) we decided to finish off the day with a couple of quick drinks in Kraków’s charming main square. Of course, drinks turned into dinner, and the night just got away from us.

Carly and Tim live in England and came to Kraków for a long weekend.  I love that about Europe – within a couple of hours, you can be anywhere! We chatted to them all day, Carly was a teacher, so she and the kids were on holidays. Tim worked in ‘sports’.  He was not very forthcoming about his job.  However, he told us about this great app “Been” on which you can mark off each country you’ve been to (it’s a good app, recommend it for travellers). Turns out, Tim’s been all over the place “for work”. We asked him about Georgia, because it’s a country on our bucket list, but he confessed he’d only been to the stadium there “for work”.  Eventually, we managed to wheedle out of him, that he’s some kind of famous football coach and a former professional player etc. Of course, we had no idea what he was talking about, so it was a perfect relationship – we didn’t go all fan-girl on him, and he could relax knowing we had no ulterior motive.

One of the other guys on our tour (let’s call him Ed) was a design engineer on the Formula 1 Alpine team. Rosco was pretty excited to find this out, an gave Ed a congratulatory high five.

• Tim: “how come he gets a high five? I didn’t get a high five. What about me?”
• Rosco: shrug. “I don’t care about football. I don’t know anything about it mate!“
• Tim: eye roll.
• Everyone else: laughing.

Anyway, we met some awesome people, and had a great couple of evenings together in Kraków. Needless to say, I’m putting together a three-week Australian travel program for them for next year (it’ll be one more country for the Been App).

AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

I have debated with myself whether to mention the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration and extermination camps in this blog. I don’t want to trivialise or be disrespectful to the memories of the 1.3 million people who perished there, nor do I particularly want to retell the truly heinous acts that occurred.

But with Russian’s invasion of Ukraine playing out across the border only 300km away, it seems a good time to reflect on the holocaust and the horrifying acts humans are capable of inflicting on their fellow mankind. To me, it felt important to visit as an act of respect and remembrance.

Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest of Nazi extermination camps. It comprised the original camp, known as Auschwitz I, and the large Birkenau extension (with its four, purpose built gas chambers and crematoriums) , sometimes referred to as Auschwitz II.  Up to 6,000 people a day were killed in gas chambers. A DAY. Most of them were Jews, some 1.1 million souls, who were transported there from all over Europe.

The Nazis believed the Jewish were sub-human.  They were not even good enough to be used for slave labour and were taken straight from the trains to the gas chambers.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is a day trip from Kraków. It’s about two hours or so by road (we had a mini-van), then you spend two hours at Auschwitz, then another 90 minutes or so at the Birkenau camp, a few minutes’ drive away.

Despite being such a gruesome historical setting, Auschwitz-Birkenau receives up to 9,000 visitors a day. It’s an astounding number, and the area surrounding the camps is jammed with parked cars, buses and vans. Entry to the camps is actually free, but if you want a guided tour (we did) and transport from Kraków and back again (most people), it costs about 67 Euro per person (about $100 AUD).

Entry times into Auschwitz-Birkenau are limited and must be pre-booked.  It’s to ensure that each booking slot has the opportunity to see all the gruesome ‘highlights’ of the camps, without being overcrowded. Outside the entry gates, there were people milling everywhere, waiting in their groups, for their allocated booking slot.

Our group of seven (Tim, Carly, George, Ruby, ‘Alpine’ Ed, Rosco and I) joined another 23 people for the 11am timeslot. Security was strict, with passports sighted, bags checked and various other entry procedures.

Once through security, we were given headphones and receivers on lanyards. Standing in the hot sun, we followed the instructions of our English-speaking guide to tune the receivers to her microphone frequency.

With the sun beating down from a cloudless blue sky, we headed off to start the tour.  The first stop were the main gates to the concentration camp, where we walked beneath the ironwork lettering stating “Arbeit macht frei” (work sets you free).  Wow – punch to the gut, straight up.

Our guide was a thin Polish woman in a bright green dress, fashionable brimmed sunhat and strappy flat sandals. She had lost relatives here at Auschwitz. Her soft voice came to us through our headphones. Her heavily accented voice, despite its softness, was flush with sadness, horror and bitterness. No-one else spoke, there were no questions, no chatter. It was very, very quiet.  For a place with 1000s of tourist in it, you could hear a pin drop.  It must be one of the world’s toughest jobs, retelling these stories, day after day.

It was horrifying, surreal, with images burnt into my retinas, never to be forgotten:

• the towering piles of women’s hair, cut from their heads after deaths, and now kept in glass-walled, darkened rooms (just a fraction of what the Nazi’s collected on display at Auschwitz).
• the towering pile of confiscated shoes – big, small, sturdy and delicate, they are all represented. I look mournfully at a stylish wedged heel, a symbol of the hope a young lady must have felt at the time she packed her suitcase.
• the collection of suitcases, with the owners’ names carefully written on the outside, so they could find their belongings ‘afterwards’.
• the wooden prisoners’ quarters at Birkenau, based on a horse stable designed for 52 horses, now repurposed to accommodate 400 prisoners, with no heating or toilet facilities provided. Life expectancy in the camps was between six weeks and three months. They were worked to death and died from exposure, malnutrition, and disease.
• The corridor lined with the photos of former prisoners.

Obviously, the passage of time has erased many of the obvious sensory scars, the smells, the noise, the suffering.  Strangely, I found Auschwitz-Birkenau to be hauntingly beautiful (yes, I know that sounds inappropriate). Auschwitz, in particular was so neat, so precisely laid out (they were the former Polish army barracks before being ‘repurposed’ by the Nazis).  Beyond the barbed wire fences, the guard houses, and the railway lines, the grass was rich green, and the sky azure blue. The buildings were brick and multi-storied with pitched roofs and stone staircases.  The paths between the buildings were lined with beautiful trees. The entrance to the gas chamber looked inviting, tree-lined, cool and shady. It was so incongruous. Very jarring.

Our time at Auschwitz-Birkenau was long, hot and uncomfortable. It was oppressive, both in terms of the weather (a thunderstorm was brewing) and psychologically. After the tour finished, we were all emotionally drained, not unexpected after several hours in a place of death, suffering and hatred.

I guess that’s why we met up for drinks after the tour. And also, why our drinks turned into dinner, and then hours of talking and new friendships.  I think we all needed to experience something life-affirming afterwards, a focus on life and freedom.

Regardless of how wretched a trip to the concentration and extermination camps may make you feel, it’s important to remember that the Nazi’s final solution did not prevail. The evil at Auschwitz was defeated.

“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.  George Santayana (author / philosopher)

More to come……

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