The Power of 20 Minutes

Before you begin to read this, I ask that you check the clock to see what time you started reading this. I promise this isn’t anything stupid, but you’ll find out why in the end I ask you to do so.

Brooke and I left Wroclaw heading for Krakow after only one night there, anxiously wondering what kind of city it was going to be after making our first stop in Polski. We got to Krakow after a 5 hour train ride, and found ourselves a taxi, who we found out later charged us double the price of what it should cost to get from the train station to our hostel… still, only $10. Mama’s Hostel is located right in the city center and as we were driving up to it, we were more and more excited as we saw the hustle and bustle of Poland’s second largest city. We again were three floors up from the main level to find our clean, comfy and very fresh hostel.

We settled in for a bit before looking for someplace to eat and found ourselves at a restaurant serving both pizza and traditional Polish food. I, guiltily, had pizza not pierogies, but I smelled pizza before we sat down and couldn’t resist. After enjoying that, we really just walked around, gathering our bearing and enjoying a cooler evening with ice cream. Krakow is a beautiful city full of young people and lots of things going on. It finally felt like we were back in Europe again. Being exhausted from our trip, we headed in for the night. Our seemingly fun hostel, full of promising young people from everywhere, did not let us down, by any means, as we were up for most of the night listening to our neighbors come in and out after experiencing the great nightlife Krakow has to offer. Feeling fairly boring, we promised each other we would go out the next night.

After waking up from a not-so-restful rest, we made our way to the Wawel Castle located very close to the city center. Not really wanting to do everything the attraction had to offer, we felt no sense of disappointment when we found out the one thing we actually wanted to do was, of course, closed on Mondays. It was still enjoyable to walk around the grounds, as well as walk through the Wawel Cathedral, which boasts the tombs of four centuries worth of Polish royalty. Interestingly, Brooke and I were both wearing summer dresses, neither of which covered our shoulders, and instead of not permitting us to go in and visit (like Sacre Couer in Paris) they provide you with a shawl that you pay a deposit on. After this, in order to exit the grounds, we made our way out of the castle via the Dragon’s Cave. For as little as it was, it was pretty cool – climbing down a spiral staircase of the hill into a dank cave, coming out by the river where there is a statue of a dragon that bursts fire every few minutes.

The Dragon’s Cave led us (sort of) in the direction we wanted to go to visit Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, before the Jews were moved even farther out of the city into the ghetto. There we found many synagogues, some of which you could go in to. This being the first time I had ever stepped into an active synagogue, I appreciated the fact that Brooke is Jewish. I think the experienced was enhanced by the fact that she could explain to me what I was looking at… kind of bringing the whole scene home in my mind, rather than just a beautiful building where Jews once or still do worship. We also went into a museum located in one of the inactive synagogues, which was a little disappointing; there were photographs of Jews in the area in the 1920s. As interesting as the pictures were, it wasn’t as extensive as I’d hoped it would be.  After finishing the “Jewish Heritage Walk” we wanted to see if we could find remnants of the ghetto wall but weren’t terribly successful. We passed a very tall, older looking building that possibly could have been part of it, but nothing was marked. Krakow is also the location of Schindler’s Factory (as in the movie), which we also didn’t choose to visit, along with the Plaszow Concentration Camp. I think it says a lot that within the close vicinity of the city, there are pieces of just about every step/aspect of the relatively recent horrific history of the Jews – they were truly a huge part of the city until their annihilation in 1944.

Part of experiencing this Jewish culture was most definitely, for us, the need to experience Jewish food. Naturally this only means one thing: bagels. No, really. Brooke read in her book about this place called Bagel Mama, which we couldn’t find at first and happened upon it when we weren’t looking (it changed locations). The bagel was FANTASTIC and the cream cheese was even better. Nothing looked more natural than a Jew and her schmear. Just kidding, sort of. We really enjoyed our little break at Bagel Mama and met an American sitting there was well, who had just come to Europe after touring Southeast Asia. After a nice conversation, we bid him farewell and headed back to the city center to do a little shopping.

On our way we stopped at a few big Catholic churches, typically with nuns and priests bustling about. Honestly, I don’t even know how I’m going to label my pictures, they were all just so beautiful and there were so many. Never once, though, did we find a church that was not Catholic… As we walked right into the middle of the city center, we approached an arcade, Cloth Hall, full of shopping, particularly for tourists. One of Poland’s greatest goods is Amber, so we enjoyed looking at all the different kinds of jewelry, along with fur, leather and hand carved wooden goods. We bought our postcards and ate some dessert before heading back to relax before our friend, Morgan, who we met in Berlin, arrived to join us for some of this journey.

When she did come, we got ready and headed out for dinner and enjoyed a very tasty Mexican meal, then came back to get ready and go out. We tried some true Polish vodka (a must according to anything about traveling to Poland) and headed out to find a club to dance. After many failed attempts at locating one that was recommended to us by our hostel receptionist, we found one called Carpe Diem II and decide to try it. Located in the basement of a building, people were swarming us the second we got there, knowing we were Americans, and just wanting to talk. Two American guys found us wanting to play fussball, but someone had already taken the table before we got there, so we ended up talking to them for a bit. The one guy I ended up talking with was from New Jersey, but went to school at USC as a Russian major and moved to Prague right after, helping to run a pub crawl business… he then moved to Krakow to start one there. Our conversation started out light getting into how stupid USC is for losing their titles because of NCAA regulations and how stupid Philly is, to the importance of Russian vs. German language and history to the War in Afghanistan. By the time Morgan had finally rescued me from the “conversation” I was being yelled at by two different American guys about how it’s probably not true that the outcome is worth the cost. Let me tell you u how many other things I wished I could have been doing at that moment than be cornered by a drunk American who hates Corporate America so much he decided to move to undeveloped Europe in order to run pub crawls, in a club, in the middle of Krakow, Poland, because I don’t have all the answers to war.

By the time I had finally gotten away, Brooke had convinced our Metallica t-shirt wearing, long haired, grungy DJ that if he played Single Ladies by Beyonce, she would do the entire dance on the stage. While waiting, and after he finally played the song for her, we enjoyed dancing to some fun and kind of old American music. Once Linkin Park came on, we headed out, only to walk in the wrong direction, but finally arriving back at our hostel.

Our next morning was a little early as it was devoted to going to Auschwitz, which is about an hour and a half outside of Krakow. I have been to two other camps before, Dachau, not far from Munich, twice and Sachsenhausen, right outside Berlin, once. But, they were primarily prison camps, with gas chambers that were barely if ever used. Auschwitz, as most of you probably know, was an extermination camp where at least 1.1 million people were killed.

Our tour took us to two different places, Auschwitz I and Birkenau. Auschwitz I was more of a museum within the buildings where the prisoners once stayed, as it was the first installment in the area, and wasn’t really where the mass exterminations happened. There we saw over 80,000 shoes that were taken from the adults and children who were brought there, and two tons of hair that had been shaved from their heads. We also saw all the suitcases with the victims’ names on them and brushes, shoe polish – all the belongings they brought with them. These were all kept because the idea was that all these goods would be re-circulated into German society, and the hair was used for German textiles. We also walked around the basement of one of these buildings that was used for standing and starvation cells. As punishment, a prisoner would sometimes have to stand all night in one of these cells and then go back out to work in the morning for 11 hours. Starvation cells are pretty self-explanatory; the biggest story coming from a Catholic priest who chose to starve for another prisoner who was to be punished. He lasted 2 weeks in the cell before they killed him, since the starvation hadn’t.  It was all so sickening, and it hit me the hardest when someone was passing me in the hall and I brushed up against the wall. Then, I started thinking about all the people who were up against that wall less than a hundred years ago and what they were going through. I felt so dirty.

As we were walking around, we were basically walking around with a very large group of Israeli military officers. They were obviously there for a special trip, with permission to take pictures where most did not, from all of the different branches of the military. I found it kind of crazy because of what some of those guys are still dealing with today in their own country, which was suppose to be a safe place for them to settle. I also was just really intimidated by them, because who knows what all they’ve done and seen. I would NEVER want to mess with someone from the Israeli military… I was nervous enough just looking at them.

  One very intimate area we were in with these soldiers was one of the gas chambers at Auschwitz I, where 2,000 people were killed in twenty minutes. This happened more so at Birkenau than Auschwitz I, but the only one we could tour was there because the ones at Birkenau were burned down. Birkenau was more of what most would picture as a concentration camp. With huts that held more people than they should have all built over a vast space… It wasn’t at all like the stone cottage looking barracks at Auschwitz I. And, although most of the huts are no longer there, we were able to walk into a couple that were reconstructed and get a feel for what they were like. This is also where (if you have this picture in your mind) the Jews were brought by train directly into the camp. Their selection process took place immediately, and 75% were sent directly to the gas chambers. Others were kept to either work, or be used for medical experiments. I also learned that Auschwitz was the only camp that tattooed numbers on the Jews arms after they stopped actually keeping photographic records of them because there were too many coming in all at once.

  All I ever think about when I think about tattooed numbers is an old old French man who had numbers on his arm and his wife who I sat next to on an airplane flight a long time ago – I don’t even know from or to where my trip was that time. For the few survivors there still are today, and how many haven’t died simply of age later on, the chances of meeting someone like that are so slim. What stories he must have had… I can’t even imagine.

We finally got back to Krakow after a long, emotional, hot day and decided tonight would be the night for some pierogi action. It was better than any pierogi I had ever had before… What a good decision. We got some ice cream and walked around, really just taking in the city square on the beautiful night where you know it’s the top of an hour because you hear a bugle being played from the highest tower of St. Mary’s Church, reminiscing the warning calls from medieval times; which ends abruptly, representing the story of when a trumpeter was killed by an arrow during his warning by an approaching intruder.

After getting to relax and some late night pizza, we settled in and called it a night. And now, I’m on the train to our next destination.

Honestly, Polski was good to us. And by the way, we only called it Polski because Brooke wanted to - the proper term is Polska. It was way different than anything I’d ever experienced before and I’m glad we went. There was talk when we arrived in exciting Krakow if we would have enough time to see everything, rather than having two full days for the city, like we would have had had we not gone to Wroclaw. But we most definitely got to see everything that we wanted to.

When chatting with my brother, Matt, about Poland and its history, there was no question that no country has really been through more than Poland, having been taken over MANY times. But, what a testament to time that is… Poland is still standing now, gaining more and more development, enough for us to be able to visit. We walk around cathedrals, shop in stores, visit castles, eat bagels and do even minor things like shower all in about 20 minutes each. But, the most horrific things that anyone could ever imagine can also happen within twenty minutes, like the annihilation of 2,000 people. In seven and a half days, Brooke and I will have left Berlin, traveled to Wroclaw, traveled to Krakow, traveled to Prague and be on our way to Budapest. In a total of seven and a half days 1.1 million people were killed in one camp. Time is a powerful thing, and traveling allows you to appreciate it, as you go around trying to grasp where other people have come from, what they’ve experienced and how it affects their every day lives. Some people have it far easier than others, for sure.

  This part of Europe has had quite a history, and even though it sounds fantastic and fun (which it is), there’s a part of it that’s very taxing. Even when talking to the American at the club, and trying to explain to him, that assuring the freedom for the future of children in Afghanistan is worth fighting for for so many people, he just didn’t get it. We come from different places, have different histories, different languages, money, but we’re humans, with the same wants and needs. Morgan, Brooke and I had an interesting conversation after Auschwitz about who should feel guilty about the Holocaust, if anyone. My opinion? No one should bare the absolute guilt of it, because for many of us, it’s beyond our very existence. But the weight of how awful humans are capable of being should be on every single person’s shoulders. I believe that in remembering the past, we need to pay it forward to the people who still suffer today. So, traveling to a place like Polski was certainly fun, but as we saw the communist housing and run down factories, along with the devastation upon anything good and Jewish, so it’s also very humbling, as Poland still seeks to be designated as a developed country.

After writing about my couple days in Krakow for two hours, I understand this has become pretty lengthy. But, I’m sure it didn’t take you a whole 20 minutes to read, so I challenge you to spend the rest of the twenty minutes thinking about it all… What do you do in twenty minutes? My usual answer would probably be: facebook. In this short amount of time, we as humans allowed someone else to and are capable of killing 2,000 people. I sure hope it frightens you as much as it does me. Then, try thinking about all the good things humans are capable of doing within 20 minutes, for instance, which is all it took for me to distribute a couple hundred bags of rice to people in Haiti, each containing enough rice to feed a family for a week.

I hate to end this on such a harsh note. I loved Polski and everything we saw and experienced. It also makes me love America even more and makes me miss everyone I’m writing this for…  So stay tuned for what Prague can bring to the table!