HELLO POLAND.

First reaction of Poland, by the entire group: Wow. Poland doesn't suck? This is awesome! As American students, we were really quite prepared for the dreary, sad country that is always presented to us as the down-trodden, borderless little brother of Europe. I mean, can Poland ever keep a strong border? Sorryyyyy. But the landscape is beautiful (see pictures), the people are relatively nice, and the sites of medieval Krakow were gorgeous. More on that later.

After quite a stressful night* we got there at a horrifying 6:30am and immediately realized that we had no idea how to get to our hostel. Whoops. We did finally get there after some very kind English speakers in an upscale hotel gave us the 411. Our hostel was soooo cool! The decoration was like spray paint on the walls, all peace love and Lenin. Obviously a post-soviet era hostel. They fed us breakfast and were able to get us in early, into our summer camp room of 12 bunkbeds. Needless to say, we all immediately passed out.

Our say in Krakow was full on tourist. Maps out in the street and everything. We saw the old Jewish quarter, which consisted of several beautiful synagogues, as well as the Old Town which still has the fortification walls from medieval times--the Florian Gate is the center attraction there. The most beautiful thing, the "must see" of Krakow is Wawel Castle. There is a gorgeous cathedral there with a bunch of royal tombs and such. The Castle is the typical Polish Catholic, over the top cathedral, but it is so pretty. I'm not a huge fan of all the silver gilded crap, but their were several royal tombs from the 1300s that were painted in the old Slovanic style that reminded me so much of Russia and were so beautiful. I like the simpler one's so much better.

The next morning we all rose at o' dark thirty to take the bus to Auschwitz. Our tour guide was this little woman named Anya who grew up in the town of Auschwitz and had been leading tours there for 3 years after working at the museum while she was in school (sound familiar?) and she was fantastic. We started at Auschwitz proper and went through several buildings were they had exhibits. We saw 2 tons of real human hair, hundreds of shoes and several other devastating exhibits. We were all nauseous from the shear inhumanity of it all. We ended that half of the tour with a walk through the first crematorium. Like we walked through the room where people actually died from being gassed with cyanide. I was devastated. It took several minutes for us all to compose ourselves after that. Next we went over to Birkineau, or Auschwitz II. That is where most people lived and where the other 4 gas chambers were. Two buildings have been reconstructed by the museum, and we walked through where the victims slept and bathed, and often died. There are hundreds of chimneys all over the grounds marking were wooden housing barracks used to stand. It was just mind-blowing.

I credit my group greatly for pulling themselves through that with the most mature, respectful attitudes I could imagine. One of the most striking things for me, was how my group, intelligent and snarky as we all are, were so able to continue our lives and our conversations that evening without ever offending anyone's reaction to the mornings tour. We were able to maintain the rest of the day without jolting anyone from the little dark cloud that necessarily follows a person for a few hours after that experience, but also without ever discrediting that dark cloud--it was appropriate. We needed that dark cloud to make it real, but we needed life to go on as well. As we walked out of Birkineau, as so many were unable to do, we quietly and slowly resumed our conversational habits: talking about food, sibling rivalry, clothes. We had to continue to live our lives, and not dwell on the fact that we had just walked through the most emotionally draining experience together. Needless to say, I think this weekend was one of the most important tours of my life, and will influence me for years to come. My day there will never be forgotten, and I hope that I will be able to share my experience in order to enrich my own teaching of their stories.

We used our evening in Krakow to celebrate the birthday of one of our girls, who anti-climatically turned 21 in a country she could already drink in. We bought her an individual sized bottle of champagne and a chocolate cake, which we enjoyed trying to force on each other on the train ride home. After a serious nap, I am now ready to power through the paper I have to write this afternoon, and check on my laundry that is currently being spun around an Eastern European washing machine at approximately 600 miles an hour.

-

Emily

*One of our number, a loner who always seems just 3 seconds behind the ball and 2 inches from normal missed the train to Krakow. Knowing how excited he had been to join us, we were all a little concerned. We had no way to get in touch with him and our professor wasn't answering his phone so we had to resort to calling the program director from Charles University and trying to get her to contact her. He was eventually found, though the only real reasoning we got out of him was that he had "gotten lost. really lost" which made no sense since we had all gone to the train station together only 24 hours before. Ah well. He made it to Poland and found his way to Auschwitz were he found us, miraculously. It was all quite strange.