POLAND || Kraków & Auschwitz-Birkenau - TMQE Travels 2022

TMQE Travels are travelling again! This time we are heading to Poland, to visit the breath-taking Krakow, before heading to the utterly devastating concentration camps at Auschwitz.
Jérémy and Ben here again! We love to travel and to satisfy our wanderlust, we are on a European roadtrip exploring the best places for a city break on the continent. We love to escape Britain to experience the best culture, cuisine and attractions that Europe has to offer. If you’re a tourist like us and just need a good itinerary for what to do and how to do it when you’re in the French Alps, we will show you the best things to put on your itinerary.
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Transcript:
Krakow is Poland’s second largest city, sitting in the south of the country. Serving as the nation’s capital until 1596 and as a result, the city is full of medieval civic buildings with impressive architecture befitting of the centre of the Polish Empire.
The city revolves around Rynek Glowny, which is the main market square. The square is divided in two by the Cloth Hall, a vast market-hall. The square and all its monuments date from Krakow’s Golden Age, which straddles the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the rule of Casimir IV, when many famed artists and architects were living and working in the city. The result is a gorgeous old town, which was the very first UNESCO World Heritage Site in the world.
A short walk from the square is Wawel Castle, which sits on a hill overlooking a bend in the River Vistula. The home of the Polish kings and queens until the sixteenth century, the Renaissance courtyard is surrounded by palaces, defensive structures and Wawel Cathedral, where the Polish monarchs where crowned and buried.
One famous Krakowian is Pope Jean-Paul II, the most influential Pope of the last century. Poland is a strongly Catholic country and there are impressive churches all over the city. Serving as Archbishop of Krakow before he became Pope, Jean-Paul – born Jozef Wojtyla – would continue to remember the city with great affection throughout his papacy, fighting hard to bring about the fall of the Iron Curtain.
Before World War Two, Krakow had one of the largest Jewish communities in the world. Known as Kazimierz, the Jewish District was a thriving area, filled with Jewish homes and businesses. After the occupation by the Nazis, a wall was built around the area, creating a ghetto used to segregate Jews from the rest of the city, before eventually being cleared in 1942. Famously, Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist who moved to Krakow during the occupation saved 1200 Jews during the Holocaust by employing them in his enamelware factory, which today has been converted into an extensive museum.
Only two hours’ drive from Krakow, Auschwitz consists of three camps. We began our visit in Auschwitz II, otherwise known as Birkenau. Though most of the buildings were demolished by the retreating Germans at the end of the war, some of the accommodation sheds have been rebuilt and restored. And each one of these would have contained 700 people, living in freezing and squalid conditions. Built as an overspill camp when Auschwitz I was full, Birkenau grew and grew in size. In fact, the Nazis intended to build even more, but this ambition was never realised. What struck us most on arrival was the sheer scale of the site. Standing in the centre, the row after row of ruined barracks span far out to the horizon, without a tree in sight or birdsong anywhere near. Instead, the camp is completely silent.
Three kilometres away is Auschwitz I. Originally an army barracks, it was requisitioned by the Nazis in 1940 and converted into a prison camp. It notorious sign saying “Arbeit Macht Frei”, which means “work sets you free” in German. The gruesomely ironic slogan, which was the title of a nineteenth century German novel, was used at the entrance of many concentration camps, but the sign at Auschwitz is the most infamous. Inside the barracks there are exhibitions, showing the stolen possessions of the camp’s prisoners. Here, the scale of the genocide on a human level becomes most apparent. With rooms filled with suitcases, spectacles, crutches, shoes and human hair, these mountains of stolen items are devastating in their magnitude.
Considerably smaller than Birkenau, Auschwitz I is a completely different experience than its sister camp. Its rows of barracks are surrounded by double barbed-wire fences and watch-towers, but just outside the enclosure is the site’s one gas chamber, which is the only one still intact across the three concentration camps at Auschwitz. Inside, the crematorium still exists.And inside the chamber itself, traces of what happened there are visible eighty years later.