Dorothy's diary Good Friday 10th April

Good Friday 10^th April 

We had a very disturbed night as one of our neighbours was still watching television at 4.00a.m. We were therefore quite tired. Had a good breakfast and packed a lunch and went to await our minibus to take us to Auschwitz (Oswiecim). The route through Krakow was rather tortuous through all the back streets to collect other passengers.

The journey to Auschwitz took us about 1 ½ hours and there we met with our tour guide, her English was very good and she made the tour very interesting and informative.

The weather was lovely and warm and the surroundings were clean and tidy which gave us a sanitised sense of the horrors that had occurred 60 odd years ago. Everyone was very quiet and respectful.

 

ARBEIT MACHT FREI

WORK MAKES FREEDOM

The only freedom that the prisoners who entered Auschwitz and Birkenau achieved was the final freedom of Death.

The most poignant things that we saw were the thousands of shoes and spectacles and the mountain of human hair. The facts and figures that our guide gave us were too awesome to take in at the time. At one point we were in a corridor in one of the blocks, the walls were lined with photographs of some of the prisoners and two had flowers placed by them, presumably by relatives.

I watched the film ‘The boy in the striped pyjamas’ before we left home and wondered if there was any truth that the commandant lived with his family in the camp. It was true. The commandant had a villa adjacent to the main camp and he lived there with his wife and five children

Birkenau is the other camp on the same site, about 3 kms away. This was much larger and the blocks were built of brick and wood. The gate to this camp is the very famous gateway with the railway running through the middle. You don’t realise how long the railway line is until you actually see it. We were quite out of breath when we reached the end and we are quite fit and healthy, so it made us realise a little of what the prisoners had to go through as soon as they reached the end of their long journey in cattle trucks.

We were told that some Greek prisoners even had to pay for a ticket for the journey.

I won’t say that I enjoyed the experience but both Alan and I are pleased that we made the effort to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau.

We had a pleasant drive back to Krakow and then went for a wander round to find the Post Office then got back to the flat and had baked beans on toast for tea.