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.
Showing posts with label Lithuania. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Lithuania. Show all posts
Thursday, 1 September 2011
Saturday, 27 August 2011
Lithuania
So I ended up only taking 12 photos in Lithuania. It was weird and kind of a shame. Also 10 of the photos are of my friends, not of the town itself. The old town was lovely, just like the last two old towns. (Sorry… starting to look forward to a modern city again already! I am such a city girl.) I still should’ve taken photos though. We arrived in Vilnius by public bus and did our usual orientation walk in the afternoon, but I was a bit tired and in a bit of a fog and wanted to be in bed, so didn’t take any photos even though I had my camera around my neck. In fact when Tony suggested that we walk up to the tower to see the view over the town, Adrian, Julie, Kat, Janette and I went for a coffee instead. And spent the time talking about kiddie porn and prostitutes. As you do. Getting a little too familiar maybe… At least we were all of the same opinion on both subjects, that could’ve got awkward fast.
After our walk, the entire group went out for dinner. Our entire group numbers 16, not including Tony, so for everybody to go together is quite an undertaking, and this was only the second time we’ve done it. The first time, we went to Lido restaurant in Riga, Latvia… which turned out to be 20min away by tram, in the middle of a random theme park that I never discovered the name of. It was a bit of a strange experience all round. This time we went to a restaurant in the middle of Vilnius’ old town, so it was easy to get to and easy to get home, which sold it to me straight away. However they led us down to the basement, which smelt weird, and the food was by general consensus not the greatest. We had two tables, and the seven of “us” always grab seats together, and we had Denise and Jason at our table as well, and everyone else at the other. So we didn’t really mix as a group any more than usual, which did sort of defeat the purpose a little. As a tour group we are pretty unusual, we have a 50-year age span between the youngest and the oldest, and the majority are closer to the upper end of the age span. That means that we tend to want to do very different things and have very different budgets, and it has very much become two separate groups. It’s a shame.
The only thing I actually actively went and did in Vilnius was to visit the KGB museum. It’s in an old building that was used by the KGB and various other related agencies during the war and the Soviet reign, which they’ve turned into a museum. It has a prison in the basement and all that kind of thing. My god, it was horrific. The two upper floors were fine, they were about the history of Lithuanians over that period of time, and had all the usual, lots of reading and lots of personal items and weapons that they’d recovered from various places over the years. The worst part was a video about the activities of the KGB etc, which had old photos, including one of five men facing a firing squad of fifteen or twenty, the instant before they opened fire. The prison was ok too, although they kept a lot people in a very small space in some of those cells. There was a sign outside one particular cell, which was about 4x2m, which said that at some points there were 15 to 20 people being kept in that cell at one time. They still had water cells too, which I’d never heard of, where as a punishment you’d have to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room and they’d cover the rest of the floor with about four inches of ice cold water. So if you went to sleep or fell over for whatever reason you’d land in the water.
What was truly terrible was the execution chamber. When you walk in, you come around a corner and through a doorway, and right in front of you is a screen with a short DVD playing on it, which shows how they executed people in very graphic, full colour detail. You might want to skip this bit. They dragged them into the room, gave them a good look at the wall in front of them which was covered in everyone else’s blood, the executioner walked in behind them and shot them point blank through the back of the head, and then they shoved them through a chute and onto the back of a truck, and brought in the next one. Around the edges of the monitor, there are bullet marks all over the wall. By the time I got there I’d dropped off from the rest of the group, and I really wish I’d had someone with me. I will never forget that place. I was so upset and angry and in such shock that I felt physically ill. My heart was pounding and my stomach was burning. What I really needed was someone to grab onto, but me being me I’m too shy to grab someone I’ve known for a week. It took me probably an hour to calm down properly.
We sat outside for a few minutes while we all caught up with each other. Adrian was sitting next to me, and he kept asking “why did they do it?” over and over. Steve’s the war buff so he was fielding all the questions, but he didn’t have any answer. There is no answer.
We decided after that to have a pretty quiet afternoon, and to just wander back into town and find some lunch and a drink. So that was what we did. We looked in shop windows and found a pharmacy while we filled in an hour (we left the museum at 11am and we kinda figured that even on holiday we couldn’t really justify beer at that time of day). Then we found a café where we could sit outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. We got there at midday and left at 5pm. I really needed some time to just sit and relax and listen to the others talk and wait for Amanda’s laxatives to take effect (she’d been blocked up since we had that medieval feast in Estonia, and in the end she took three laxatives and it still took 8 or 9 hours to work, which we then heard about in detail… Adrian really wanted me to put this story on my blog. I would not usually write about other people’s bowel movements). We also all got involved in a big argument, which is still going on, because Julie decided that Ian can have another dog if he buys her a Jag. He’s now offering to take her to the Galapagos Islands instead. She really wants a Jag. He really doesn’t think he should have to fork out $50k just to get a dog. They already have three dogs but Ian wants another so they can have one of each colour. Apparently he doesn’t have a black and white one yet.
We’re all with Julie. Happy wife, happy life, Pancakes.
These are my favourites of the photos I did take:
By the way, what does Snoop Dogg use his umbrella for??.... For drizzle.
After our walk, the entire group went out for dinner. Our entire group numbers 16, not including Tony, so for everybody to go together is quite an undertaking, and this was only the second time we’ve done it. The first time, we went to Lido restaurant in Riga, Latvia… which turned out to be 20min away by tram, in the middle of a random theme park that I never discovered the name of. It was a bit of a strange experience all round. This time we went to a restaurant in the middle of Vilnius’ old town, so it was easy to get to and easy to get home, which sold it to me straight away. However they led us down to the basement, which smelt weird, and the food was by general consensus not the greatest. We had two tables, and the seven of “us” always grab seats together, and we had Denise and Jason at our table as well, and everyone else at the other. So we didn’t really mix as a group any more than usual, which did sort of defeat the purpose a little. As a tour group we are pretty unusual, we have a 50-year age span between the youngest and the oldest, and the majority are closer to the upper end of the age span. That means that we tend to want to do very different things and have very different budgets, and it has very much become two separate groups. It’s a shame.
The only thing I actually actively went and did in Vilnius was to visit the KGB museum. It’s in an old building that was used by the KGB and various other related agencies during the war and the Soviet reign, which they’ve turned into a museum. It has a prison in the basement and all that kind of thing. My god, it was horrific. The two upper floors were fine, they were about the history of Lithuanians over that period of time, and had all the usual, lots of reading and lots of personal items and weapons that they’d recovered from various places over the years. The worst part was a video about the activities of the KGB etc, which had old photos, including one of five men facing a firing squad of fifteen or twenty, the instant before they opened fire. The prison was ok too, although they kept a lot people in a very small space in some of those cells. There was a sign outside one particular cell, which was about 4x2m, which said that at some points there were 15 to 20 people being kept in that cell at one time. They still had water cells too, which I’d never heard of, where as a punishment you’d have to stand on a tiny platform in the middle of the room and they’d cover the rest of the floor with about four inches of ice cold water. So if you went to sleep or fell over for whatever reason you’d land in the water.
What was truly terrible was the execution chamber. When you walk in, you come around a corner and through a doorway, and right in front of you is a screen with a short DVD playing on it, which shows how they executed people in very graphic, full colour detail. You might want to skip this bit. They dragged them into the room, gave them a good look at the wall in front of them which was covered in everyone else’s blood, the executioner walked in behind them and shot them point blank through the back of the head, and then they shoved them through a chute and onto the back of a truck, and brought in the next one. Around the edges of the monitor, there are bullet marks all over the wall. By the time I got there I’d dropped off from the rest of the group, and I really wish I’d had someone with me. I will never forget that place. I was so upset and angry and in such shock that I felt physically ill. My heart was pounding and my stomach was burning. What I really needed was someone to grab onto, but me being me I’m too shy to grab someone I’ve known for a week. It took me probably an hour to calm down properly.
We sat outside for a few minutes while we all caught up with each other. Adrian was sitting next to me, and he kept asking “why did they do it?” over and over. Steve’s the war buff so he was fielding all the questions, but he didn’t have any answer. There is no answer.
We decided after that to have a pretty quiet afternoon, and to just wander back into town and find some lunch and a drink. So that was what we did. We looked in shop windows and found a pharmacy while we filled in an hour (we left the museum at 11am and we kinda figured that even on holiday we couldn’t really justify beer at that time of day). Then we found a café where we could sit outdoors and enjoy the sunshine. We got there at midday and left at 5pm. I really needed some time to just sit and relax and listen to the others talk and wait for Amanda’s laxatives to take effect (she’d been blocked up since we had that medieval feast in Estonia, and in the end she took three laxatives and it still took 8 or 9 hours to work, which we then heard about in detail… Adrian really wanted me to put this story on my blog. I would not usually write about other people’s bowel movements). We also all got involved in a big argument, which is still going on, because Julie decided that Ian can have another dog if he buys her a Jag. He’s now offering to take her to the Galapagos Islands instead. She really wants a Jag. He really doesn’t think he should have to fork out $50k just to get a dog. They already have three dogs but Ian wants another so they can have one of each colour. Apparently he doesn’t have a black and white one yet.
We’re all with Julie. Happy wife, happy life, Pancakes.
These are my favourites of the photos I did take:
Adrian
Amanda and Steve
Ian and Julie
And these are the photos I took of Vilnius. They’re nothing great unfortunately. You’d think if I was only going to take two I’d at least make them good ones.
Breakfast. The square shit is egg.
Where we had lunch. For five hours.
So today we have something like 10hrs on various trains to get to Poland. Blahhhhh….. Time to go and find someone to talk to!
By the way, what does Snoop Dogg use his umbrella for??.... For drizzle.
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