Auschwitz

So we arrived into Krakow on time, got our stuff situated, and signed up for an 8:00am Auschwitz tour.  What a quick way to plunge into our Poland adventure.  It was only 80 zloty (there are about three zloty to the dollar) and took us on a long bus ride there, a guided tour of Auschwitz and Auschwitz II (Birkenau) and the ride back.

Everybody's seen photos and videos of Auschwitz-Birkenau.  Everybody's seen memorials and documentaries and Schindler's List and heard speeches and read history books.  Everybody knows that these places exist and what happened there.  Seeing them firsthand is entirely different.  Walking through the barracks, seeing crowded beds, crowded filthy, primative latrines, touching some of the miles of barbed wire surrounding the camps, walking through the same door and standing in the same gas chamber where 700 people at a time could be poisoned to death in roughly half an hour, then walking to the next room and seeing the furnaces where they were all cremated is entirely different.  Sometimes, you have to remind yourself that this isn't just a museum.  The display cases and guides and Japanese tourists make it easy to think that this is just another memorial, another reminder, another history lesson.

But it's not.