Chapter 20: Five - make that six - days in Poland

The radio started playing 'Enter Sandman' by Metallica as the bus left Kraków. 'Exit light', the lyrics go. 'Enter night'. Apt.

I didn't want to go. This trip is ultimately about enjoying myself, and it would take a fairly macabre, or at least ignorant and immature, mind to enjoy that place.

I didn't want to go, but I couldn't not go, either. I've come to Europe to enjoy myself, but also to stare history in the face, to try to not only know it but to see it, feel it, understand it. To not go, when I was so close, when I had no excuse, would be a cop-out. I almost missed out on a ticket, and paid an exorbitant amount for a tour to make sure I got one. Because I had to go.

I don't want to write about it. I want to leave the thoughts, leave the horror, back where they belong rather than have to share it, spread it, perpetuate it. But to go, and not to write, would be a cop-out. 

It's disturbing, how ordinary it all looks. Take away the barbed wire and it looks like an ordinary barracks, or maybe even an ugly sort of university or school. Take away the gate with the hideous taunt, 'Arbeit Macht Frei', and it could be a regular work site. Today there are food shops and souvenir stands. Bus parking bays and toilet blocks. It's disturbing, how it's just like any other tourist attraction. 

I didn't want to go to Auschwitz, but I had to. And now I'm writing this - I haven't even half-finished the Prague post yet, but maybe if I write this bit now I'll stop Googling about the Holocaust, which is what I've been doing all night. Because that's certainly not helping to catch up on my writing either.

I don't know what to write. What do you write about a place that was purpose-designed for mass murder? How do you use words to describe a place that has a room full of braids of women's hair, cut from their heads after they were gassed to death, for use in mattresses? What can you add to that? How can words express what it's like to look into a cell where people were deliberately left to starve to death?

I don't know what to write. I don't know what to write about the enormous long corridor of photos of inmates. People who were deemed able to work, so instead of being murdered immediately were forced to work themselves to death instead. Most photos had their age, the date they arrived at the camp and the date, if known, that they died. Few lasted more than a couple of months. In some of those inmate photos, mostly of the women, people are smiling for the camera. How did that instinct - to put on a happy face for the record - still prevail at that moment? I don't know what to write.

The ones that really got to me were two twins, next to each other on the wall. They were 16. One outlived the other by two months:

I don't know what to write. 

Some Jews were chosen to work in the crematoria themselves. They were forced to help prepare people for the gas chamber, to help them undress. They weren't allowed to tell the victims why they were really there: they had to go along with the charade, that the chambers were shower cubicles, and then after they were dead they had to transport the bodies to the ovens to be burned. My guide told a story (I haven't found any details online, but I assume it's true) about how one person forced to do this found his own mother in the change room. He helped her undress, followed her into the gas chamber and died there with her. 

I don't know what else to write. 

*

I wrote that bit a few hours after visiting Auschwitz, knowing it wouldn't get any easier. Then I put the writing away for a while. This chapter about my time in Poland will no doubt suffer a little from the delay, but I needed the break and I took it. 

Thankfully - for me, for Poland, for humanity - there is more to this part of the world than that scar left on the landscape by the Nazis. Auschwitz hangs like a dark cloud over my time in Poland and inevitably it will do the same over this post. But I will do my best not to let it drown out the good stuff.

I'm going to mostly skip over my first day in Poland, when I went to the city of Wroclaw, four hours north of Prague, for Poland's only major zoo. Wroclaw, by the way, takes Europe's deceptive pronunciation habits to a whole new level. Out of the name Wroclaw they get something that sounds vaguely like "Brotz lov'. I don't understand how w's can be so versatile. Nor is this a language designed for use with Australian accents: I must have sounded pretty funny - or perhaps awful - to any Poles who had to endure me trying to wrap my tongue around their place names.

The zoo visit was fine, apart from an entirely self-inflicted diabetes scare: I realised on the tram that I had left my testing strips behind at the hostel, but with little enough time for the zoo as it was I decided to push ahead without them. I had the testing kit itself, and I had the special strips that I use to determine if I have ketones when my blood sugar goes high. Because wilful ignorance about just how bad it can get is a key part of my diabetes coping strategy, I can't honestly say I understand what ketones are. Only that they're bad and if I have them my trip gets far too complicated. 

To get through the day I figured I could use dead reckoning for low blood sugar - in other words, treat anything that felt like a hypo with sugar - and test for ketones in the afternoon to make sure I hadn't royally stuffed up. And so that's what I did.

The test result was 0.3.

A reading of 0.1 is essentially a 'nil' reading and 0.2 is a warning sign that you might want to take extra insulin. 0.3 isn't dangerous in itself, but if it's that high there's clearly something wrong. My diabetes control, in spite of a slovenly lifestyle, is surprisingly good and I don't think I've ever been at 0.3 before. 

So 0.3 is scary, and qualifies as royally stuffing up. What blood hadn't been used for the test must have drained from my face. If that test was accurate, and *if* I couldn't bring things back under control quickly, my time in Poland had potentially become very, very stressful indeed. The sort of stress only an extended stay in hospital could induce.

What I should have done was abandon the zoo, hop on the first tram back and get a proper blood sugar reading so I could figure out what the damage was. But the zoo was no more than two thirds seen, and it's likely to be many years before I am back this way, so I decided to have an each-way bet. I gave myself a middling-sized extra dose of insulin, to jolt the blood sugar into coming down without it being *too* quick (potentially just as dangerous). And to flush - literally flush - the apparent ketones from my system I bought two litres of water and gulped it down until I couldn't drink any more.

Those steps taken, I began rushing about the rest of the zoo, and resisted testing my blood again, however stressful it was, for 45 minutes. There would be no point testing earlier, because my mitigation efforts wouldn't show up in the test, so I just dashed from exhibit to exhibit trying not to dwell too much on whether disaster may have struck. Finally enough time passed and I, somewhat shakily, performed another test.

0.1.

Deep breath. Lots of deep breaths. I was ok. I think the first one must have been a random error in the reading, as I don't think the ketones, if they were there, could have gone away *that* quickly. Either way, there was now no reason not to stay at the zoo for the hour I still had available. Indeed, there was a compelling reason *to* stay: if I may be indelicate, that almost two litres of water I'd binge-drunk was still going to require flushing, ketones or not.

From Wroclaw I made my way by bus to Kraków, the medieval capital and major tourist hub of Poland. Compared to Brotz Lov it's a piece of cake to pronounce: its 'Crack-of': all you've got to do is imagine the 'w' is a bent out of shape 'v' and you're fine.

Navigating the name and navigating the city are two different things, alas, and I was brought unstuck when planning how I would get from the bus station to the hostel. Google Maps was telling me that there were no transport options aside from a 40 minute walk, which I didn't particularly want to tackle with all my bags. I'm not sure why it didn't occur to me, but the only problem was that Google doesn't yet have public transport directions integrated into Maps here yet. There's a perfectly good tram that runs directly from the bus stop to within 100m of the hostel, but in my ignorance I got a taxi instead.

My driver was an easily frustrated woman who couldn't seem to understand where I wanted to go. She wanted a street number, but all I had was a dropped pin on Google Maps, so I showed her. After much squinting and repeated shouts for the street number, she eventually recognised where I wanted to go. "STUDENT?" She yelled, apparently assuming only students stayed in hostels. Yes, I lied. Close enough, and satisfied, off we went. When she pulled up and indicated we were there, however, I was still a kilometre away from where Google wanted to send me, and we argued for a bit before she shrugged her shoulders and drove me into a rather down at heel, strictly residential neighbourhood. I must have accidentally moved the pin as we were wrestling the phone back and forth, but she had driven off and wasn't around to enjoy her vindication. I walked the kilometre back to where she tried to drop me off. When I finally found the hostel I saw they keep an adminotaur in the basement:

A Minotaur with admin privileges?. Best not to open that door.

I was in a six bed dorm and, as the last to turn up, inevitably I got the worst bed. A top bunk, it was directly next to the light, a naked, incandescent bulb that was heating an already hot Kraków night up to what must have been 40 degrees. Sleeping here wouldn't be fun.

Now, I'm not the most extroverted of people and I need my quiet time as much as anybody else, but if I'm going to be sleeping in the same room as people for four nights I want to at least be on friendly terms. That means introducing myself, and perhaps even a little bit of inane chit chat to break the ice. Because everybody was present, and it seemed statistically unlikely that five young travellers would all separately be hanging around in bed at 10PM on a Saturday, I introduced myself and asked the room if they were travelling as a group. A half-stifled laugh from one bunk. Silence from the others, before a grudging 'no'. Then everybody went back to their smartphones.

Not going to be a social hostel then. But after a few minutes of uncomfortable silence I stepped once more into the breach. Seizing on the first moment in which one of my neighbours broke eye contact with Facebook, I said I was from Australia and asked where she was from. 'The US', she replied, and went back to the phone. Nobody else looked up.

I wasn't sure which was more oppressive, the heat or the silence. I went downstairs and asked for a different room, where I found a much more enjoyable group of people. Lisa is a software developer originally from Moscow - but currently London - who works for Google, and though she was less embracing of the title than Sam the rookie banker back in Zagreb, she is very much a genius. She assured me that while she probably *could* access my emails and browser history, Google would be able to detect it and she'd be frog-marched out of the building. It was the only instant firing offence they warned new starters about. Good to know.

Malleu- pronounced 'Mall-or' is a Belgian-Polish aspiring artist: at 19 years old she already speaks six languages (tying for Elsibio from Moldova's trip record), but she had an exam to get into art school looming, and the malign voice of her tutor was whispering in her ear that she would fail. She didn't have any creativity, this bloke had told her. Her work was meaningless. If she somehow got in she would have to work twice as hard as anybody else. She said - putting in a heroic effort to not allow her voice to crack - that he had told her he didn't want to build her hopes up. I told her to ditch the tutor, and that nobody expects a 19 year old to be reinventing the wheel. At least I was able to distract from her woes when I injected my insulin: I've never seen somebody turn quite so pale at the sight of a needle. It took all her self-control not to flee the room.

Alex, from Belarus, had just arrived in the European Union for the first time. Coming from one of Europe's poorest countries, he was trying to do it as cheaply as possible, and that meant hitch-hiking and, where possible, couch-surfing. He had even convinced a restaurant to heat up his leftovers from lunch for him for free. He showed me his collection of selfies taken with all of his drivers - 14 so far - as I explained how hitch-hiking had become much less popular in Australia thanks to Ivan Milat, and that if I tried hitching it was an even money bet whether it was a truck driver or my mother who killed me first. But it's obviously still a thriving tradition in Eastern Europe: Alex said he hadn't had to wait more than half an hour anywhere for a ride, and many of the people pulling over were single women. When I prompted him for a theory about why that is he didn't have one, but I did. Alex looks like a marble statue of Achilles.

I ventured into town the next day. I don't know what this fellow is alleged to have done, but he was clearly framed:

Kraków's old town is centred around what they proudly proclaim is Europe's oldest medieval town square. It's four hectares in size, but the effect is lost a little by a big covered market building plonked directly in the middle of it. There's also a bell towel which is apparently all that's left of the city hall, though I didn't unravel how it came to still be there when the rest is gone. It's now a focal point for events and demonstrations, and as I was going past it was hosting a rally. 

These guys are a non-partisan, pro-democracy activist group. Poland has bitter experience of what happens when democracy dies, and the current government has an authoritarian bent. I loved seeing these people standing up and fighting not for a specific vision of Poland, but for a system that guarantees their right to do so. I didn't understand a word, but I joined the crowd and listened for a short while anyway.

After lunch I headed to one of my most eagerly anticipated attractions of the entire trip: the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It is, as the name might suggest, a salt mine: three and a half kilometres of tunnels and chambers, burrowing down 327 metres into almost pure rock salt. The tour takes you down to about 130 metres below ground level, which is almost as deep as the Sydney Harbour Bridge. You're encouraged to lick the walls, like a savoury Polish take on that room in the Willy Wonka movie with the fruit-flavoured wall paper. I couldn't quite bring myself to lick them directly, but I ran my fingers along them and licked those instead: it tasted like salt.

Salt mining was hard and perilous work, and during the medieval period miners were so well paid because of the danger that many could retire after a few years and become landed gentry (the aspirational working class evidently has a long history). Some though, stuck it out, and developed a tradition over the centuries of turning their pick axes to art. Amateur sculptors - many anonymous - have filled the salt mine with carvings: of kings, of religious figures, even seven dwarves working as miners (I'm not sure if this was inspired by Snow White, or if Snow White was inspired by Wieliczka, but it surely can't be a coincidence):

Even more remarkable, though, are the chapels. There are several of them, all carved directly out of the salt: the statues are salt, the altars are salt, even the chandeliers are salt. The best of all is the..., which is still used for weekly masses on Sundays, and was carved by just three miners over the course of 40 years:

It even has a salt relief version of the Last Supper:

I'm not religious, but it's impossible not to admire the dedication, let alone the creativity and talent, that drives people to literally chip away at something for so long.

The next day never really got going, unfortunately. With a half-dreaded visit to Auschwitz looming ahead of me I decided to check out Oskar Schindler's factory near the (tragically, now 'former') Jewish Quarter, thinking I might benefit from a more uplifting story from the Holocaust than what I was bracing for the next day. By the time I got to the factory, though, the tickets were all sold out: I hadn't known they were limited, and after peeking into the exhibit space it's hard to understand why. The place looked deserted, but I obviously wasn't going to be allowed in so I gave up and went to the zoo instead.

As I was on the tram from there to the zoo I got a phone call from a Kraków number. I didn't know what it was about, but I wasn't about to incur roaming charges to find out so I killed the call and thought nothing more of it. Later in the week, shortly after entering the hostel's location into Google Maps, I got another call from a (different) local number. Curious, I plugged the number into Google: it was the hostel, but the staff denied calling. So I looked up that first number and it was... the Oskar Schindler Factory.

Creepy. They didn't have my name or number: I'd gone in, found it sold out and left. I had, however, entered the location into Google Maps. My best guess is somebody was accessing my Google Maps searches somehow and then cloning phone numbers to try to trick me into answering. I've since become rather fanatical about using my VPN.

Speaking of creepy, and on a completely different scale: Auschwitz. I've tried to capture the emotional sucker punch to the solar plexus that is visiting this place in my intro. I don't think I've managed it - I'm not sure it's possible to do so - but I don't want to try again, or to start repeating myself. So I'm going to do the patently absurd, and write about going as if it's any other landmark or museum. 

I hate tours, but a day or two before I planned to go I'd gone online and discovered that, like the Schindler factory, there were apparently a limited number of tickets to enter. I couldn't unravel whether the limit was just on the number of guided tours or on the number of people admitted full stop, but there were no tickets available to book so to be safe I searched for a tour company and bought the first available one I found. The tour companies are ticket-scalping parasites: they book up huge numbers of tickets to Auschwitz, which are free, in advance and then charge €40 to bus you there and back. They don't even run the tour: once there you're handed over to a guide who works for the camp itself. It's a scam.

The tour group barely spoke to each other for most of the tour - it's not a place that encourages idle chitchat - but I eventually fell into conversation with an American man, whose name I unfortunately didn't catch so I'll call him Bob. He was an avuncular enough fellow from Virginia Beach, and somehow or other the topic turned to American politics (it wasn't me this time. I swear. At least, I don't think it was. Well. You can't prove it). A middle aged white guy from the city that hosts the US Navy's Atlantic fleet, I had a sneaking suspicion about where Bob's politics might lie, but as we skirted around the elephant in the room he revealed a weird grab bag of views, including that private schools - and thus school vouchers - are a way to get around desegregation. Bob didn't like it, and I wondered if I had once again made the wrong guess based on demographics.

Nope. Bob stated that the US had faced a choice last year between two bad candidates, and I interjected to say that one was quite clearly superior to the other. Bob let that slide, but when I asked straight up which bad candidate he'd settled for, he said he went for Trump, and that he was "feeling pretty damn good" about that choice even now. 

I asked what Bob wants Trump to do. Abolishing the IRS and replacing income taxes with a GST came first, so I pointed out that poor people use more of their income on consumption and would pay a higher share of their income in taxes: Bob simply nodded, so I gather that's the point. Bob wants controlled - not 'xenophobic', he was at pains to point out - immigration. And he wants to get rid of Obamacare, which he says doubled his insurance costs. I explained that we have single-payer coverage in Australia, and bet him any amount he wanted that I paid less of my total income for health care, via taxes, than he does via insurance. Bob agreed that that would be true, but he opposes single-payer health care anyway.

Then things got interesting. The Clintons, you see, are criminals. They used their foundation to launder money! I chose not to bother arguing that point, but given that there's a rather significant investigation under way into Trump's own conduct, I asked Bob if he would support impeachment should the Russia investigation come up with the goods. "I don't believe that will happen -"

Sorry, Bob. Let me interrupt. I didn't ask if you thought it would happen. I asked if you would support impeachment if it does. "Well, I'd have to look at that at the time." Uh huh. "And besides, evidence is now coming out that it was really the Democrats, and NOT Trump, who were working with the Russians..."

And our journey through the looking glass was complete. I'm not making an over-inflated comparison between Trump and the Nazis here, lest I be misunderstood. But it was deeply uncomfortable having this fact-optional conversation here, in Auschwitz, where the greatest crime in human history was possible only because too many German Bobs were willing to suspend disbelief.

I didn't get up to much on what was to be my last day in Kraków. My bus was scheduled to take me to Lviv at 4:30PM: it was the latest bus that I felt confident would get me through the border before midnight, which was important because I would be leaving the Schengen zone, and exiting before midnight would avoid wasting an increasingly scarce Schengen visa day. I'd planned, pre-Auschwitz, to make a second attempt at the Schindler factory, but I was mentally Holocaust-ed out and decided to skip it. 

Instead I went back to what I do best - wandering aimlessly about, and ended up in the grounds of the Prague castle. I didn't pay to go inside, but I had a few zloty (a wonderful name for a currency) jangling in my pocket and when I saw a sign for a 'Dragon's Den' for three zloty I decided to check it out, despite not having the foggiest clue what it might be. It consisted of a long spiral staircase descending into a cave below the castle that could plausibly serve as a dragon's den. I spent a lot of my time in Kraków in dark places, one way or another.

Finally it was time for the bus. I didn't actually have my ticket paid for, because there was some technical issue with the website and it wouldn't accept payment. Instead I'd contacted the company directly and they had reserved me a seat, to pay the driver in cash when I boarded. Except I didn't board because the bus didn't turn up. I waited, and waited, and waited for the bus to arrive at the bay I'd been told to wait at. Nothing. I paced up and down the station, increasingly agitated, before finding a patch of wifi coverage and firing off an urgent email to the bus line. I never got a response, and I never got my bus either. It just didn't show.

Defeated, on the hook for a rather expensive hotel in Ukraine that I wouldn't get to use, and mourning a lost Schengen day, I returned to my Kraków hostel with my tail between my legs. "What happened?", the woman working, who I'd farewelled two hours earlier, asked when I turned up unannounced. Good question.