Auschwitz

I figure I might as well write about Auschwitz while I'm already feeling blah.  In Prague at the mo and seem to have a bit of a cold or something.  Feeling pretty worn out and my face is sore.  I think the Prague and me combination has a hex on it, last time I was here I was in bed sick for three days and hardly saw anything.

Anyway.

I wasn't as affected by Auschwitz as I thought I would be.  Maybe because I went to Dachau (outside of Munich) last time I was in Europe, so I'd been through the whole concentration camp thing before.  Auschwitz is worse in a way, because they have such a huge quantity of personal effects from the people who died there, and because so many people were sent there with the intention of them being put to death as soon as they arrived.  But it was really hard to picture what it would've been like when it was full of people.  And it was impossible to imagine having to live there.

The other reason I wasn't as affected as I imagined was that museum we went to in Lithuania.  There wasn't anything at Auschwitz that was as graphic as that.  I'd already heard about a lot of the stuff they do have, like a room with tonnes of human hair and another one with thousands of shoes and another one with hundreds of prosthetic limbs.  That was pretty confronting, but still not as bad as seeing someone shot through the back of the head in full colour.

The original gas chamber at Auschwitz is still there, and we could go inside it and then walk through into the room with the ovens.  They have a sign up asking for silence but of course there were two Asian boys talking loudly even though everyone else was being quiet, and there was a group of nuns praying.  Which kinda bugged me.  But I wasn't sure why, when I thought about it. 

There were nuns EVERYWHERE in Poland.  I've never seen so many.  Every time we went into the streets, every train and bus station, etc etc etc.

I don't quite know what else to say.  It was a sad place.  We went over to Birkenau too, but there's not much left there.  They've left one row of the wooden buildings they made people live in (I can't remember the word right now sorry) and all of the brick ones, and when you drive towards Birkenau it stretches as far as you can see in both directions.  You only know the camp stops because you can see the tops of the line of trees at the far end.  They also left the railway lines there, which go straight through the main entrance and down the middle of the camp and finish by the gas chambers.  And they've left the gas chambers as they found them, in a pile of rubble with the roof caved in.

This might be my shortest blog post so far.  Maybe when I write the next one I'll have more to say.