I can be spontaneous! Some how, some way I was convinced to take a spontaneous trip to Poland last week. It was pretty amazing. I asked for permission to leave on Thursday and I was in Poland on Sunday morning. Unfortunately, for me, getting from Ukraine to Poland isn't as easy as it sounds. You see, the way most of the trains work in my town is that they pick you up really really early in the morning. Since I couldn't get a direct train to Krakow, I had to go through Lviv. I love Lviv, so I don't really mind doing this. Anyway, the Kyiv-Lviv train stops in my town at 3:25 am, which means I have to be at the train station around 3. When I have an early train like that I never know whether or not to take a little nap or to just stay up and not risk missing my train. Well, I decided that I was just going to stay up and watch a little Grey's Anatomy. I set my alarm for 2:00 just in case I fell asleep, and started watching Grey's. Unfortunately, the drama of Meredith and McDreamy couldn't keep me awake for more than 10 minutes. I woke up at 3:00 in a panic. I thought that there was no way I could make my train because it takes me thirty minutes to walk to the train station, but then I walked outside to find a taxi right outside my door! So, I woke up the sleeping taxi driver and asked him if he could take me to the train station He agreed. Not more than 20 seconds into the trip, I realized that I couldn't find my cellphone anywhere. He saw that I was freaking out and asked what was wrong. I told him that I thought that I might have forgotten my cellphone at my apartment. He pulled a uie and took me back to my apartment. I ran up the 5 flights of stairs only to realize that I had stuck it in my other bag. I got back downstairs and we tried again. He drove about 100 mph and got me to the train station with 5 minutes to spare. The train was all ready to go, so I asked the police officer standing by the train if I could get on. He started banging on the side of the train until the conductor opened the door and put the stairs out for me to get on. I was so relieved when I finally got to my seat.
The rest of the trip to Lviv was quite pleasant. I sat in platskart with three high school aged girls who were in a traveling choir. They were amazing and I got a little private concert all the way to Lviv. I got there the next morning, had lunch and explored Lviv. My friend Devin and I left the next evening to go to Krakow. The trip to Krakow might have been the worst traveling experience that I've ever had. So, since there were no more seats on the train to Krakow, we had to go via bus. We met some other Americans at the bus station and left together to go to Poland. We drove a couple hours to the border and sat at the border for 4 hours! While we were sitting there a bunch of Ukranians got on the bus. We were really confused because the bus was practically empty from Lviv to the border, but now it was packed. We realized that all of these people were trying to smuggle things into Poland. Since a box of cigarettes cost around 50 cents, all of these old, not so skinny women had taped them around their arms, legs and stomachs. It was disgusting and really weird. We went through passport control on the Ukrainian side, then again on the Polish side. This whole process took about 2 hours. We finally got to Krakow around 6 am, said goodbye to our new American friends, and made our way to the hostel, a cute little place called Mama's Hostel.
The next day I went to Auschwitz and Birkenau with some friends from the hostel. I have been hearing about the holocaust and concentration camps since I was little, but seeing all of this made it real. At any time, the camp held between 13,000 and 16,000 inmates; in 1942 the number reached 20,000. The entrance to Auschwitz I was—and still is—marked with the sign "Arbeit Macht Frei " or “work will make you free.” The Nazis had told the Jews that they were simply going to be relocated further east, so most of them brought all of their best possessions and wore their nicest clothes. When they got to the camps, they gave them new clothes but kept all the old ones. The museum at Auschwitz had these exhibits of rooms full of these things that had belonged to the prisoners. They had one room with two tons of hair, one with thousands of shoes, and one with thousands of pairs of eye glasses. We saw the barracks where the prisoners lived and the gas chambers where they died. I stood at the place near the railroad tracks where the Nazis had unloaded the prisoners and the doctor had decided whether they were fit for labor or sent immediately to the gas chambers. "One group, about three-quarters of the total, went to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau within a few hours; they included all children, all women with children, all the elderly, and all those who appeared on brief and superficial inspection by an SS doctor not to be fully fit. In the Auschwitz Birkenau camp more than 20,000 people could be gassed and cremated each day." A lot of the barracks in Birkenau were burnt down by the Germans when the Russians came, but you can still see the foundations of most of the buildings. It was really neat to see the different nationalities at the museum. I passed tour groups speaking Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, French, Italian, English, and Spanish. The tour of the two concentration camps took around 4 hours, so we were all emotionally and physically drained by the time we left Auschwitz.
I left Poland the next day and got to my site 20 hours later. I have one week at site, then I'm off to teach at Survivor Camp in the Carpathian mountains :) I'll post more pictures soon.
