After all the fun of Zakopane, we headed to Auschwitz today. We got on another dodgy looking minibus from the central bus station (and got ripped off we think - 18 Zł each return) and rode the hour and a bit to Auschwitz. The weather seemed to realise where we were, as it drizzled all day and was generally miserable. We paid 34 Zł each (around ?9) and saw a short 20-minute film before our guided tour. The tour took us through Auschwitz I (the main camp) and Auschwitz II-Birkenau over about three hours. It was horrifyingly eye opening. We saw some of the horrific living conditions, the gas chambers and cremation furnaces. One building, Block 11, was the first test site of Cyclone 8 (the gas) and had a number of gruesome torture rooms. These included the Standing Rooms (900x900mm rooms with crawl-in 'doggy doors' where four or five people would be crammed in for a day or more at a time), the Starvation Rooms, and the Suffocation Room (a 3x3m room where 20+ people would be locked in with the window and door blocked off so they would literally suffocate). The displays were incredible - huge rooms full of human hair that was to be sold to German textile manufacturers, thousands of shoes, brushes, pots, clothes, etc that were looted by the soldiers at the camps. The living conditions were pretty amazing - five to eight people on each level of the bunk beds. In Birkenau the timber blocks had no sanitation at all; in both camps prisoners were only allowed access to toilets for 4-5 mins at a time (that's all 1400 people per toilet block in the same 4-5 mins). The scale of Birkenau is unforgettable - there were 300 blocks holding over 700 people each. It is almost indescribable.
It was a pretty sombre experience but it was well worth it.
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