Oswiecim (Auschwitz)

About 60 km from Krakow, near the town of Oswiecim (called Auschwitz, by the Germans), we passed a manufacturing plant, a large factory of some kind. We drove into town, past the RR Station, past some large brick buildings, then crossed a railroad overpass. We found a wide place between the rail tracks and the street, and stopped for lunch in our RV.

Then we looked out the window and saw we were just across the street from the huge camp known as Auschwitz II, the largest concentration camp in this part of Poland. This was the Polish village of Brzezinka, that the Germans called Birkenau. The Birkenau camp covered 422.5 acres, and there were over 300 buildings when the camp was in full operation.

We could not see the end of it, buildings extended beyond where we could see — barbed wire fence and miles of brick buildings. No way we could eat lunch here, so we looked a moment, drove the mile and a half back to the Auschwitz I camp in the town of Oswiecim, and found the main camp that covered many blocks. We did without lunch this day.

The Auschwitz camp offers both a fascination and revulsion. We could not help but shudder as we entered the gate below the sign with the cynical inscription 'Arbeit Mact Frei' (Work Makes Free). Some buildings have been prepared as museums and they contain the most grisly items. Huge piles of hair in a glass case, piles of eye glasses, cans that held poison gas, and all those other horrible things we have heard about. We have visited other Nazi concentration camps, and while they were repellent without end, none come close to the abhorrence we felt at Auschwitz.

We found the new superhighway that goes from here to Kraków, then drove almost by ourselves. The highway appeared completed and there was a vehicle once in awhile to indicate it was open, but based on the crowds of traffic we have been seeing on the little roads, we couldn’t understand why it was so empty. Then we found that in just a few miles the road just about dead-ended at the edge of Kraków, and was connected to a narrow, twisty road that went almost nowhere.

Between Auschwitz and Kraków we could see shocks of wheat in the fields. I hadn’t seen that since I was a kid, and I was the one creating the shocks of wheat.