Good Evening from Krakow! (Part Deux)

I am still in Krakow and things are kinda bleak today.

I think I saw falling snow for the first time in my life, albeit it was just the tiniest specks of dust like particles floating down. Forecast was 40% snow but tomorrow should be 60% so here's keeping my fingers crossed.

I assume that since Acey has not answered my earlier Krakow post, that he is safely home and reunited with his loved ones. Have a great time there Acey!

I took the Auschwitz Concentration Camp tour today. It was bleak and freezing. Temperature was minus 5 at least and enhanced the austerity of what I witnessed today. The concentration camp experience further emphasizes why I detest politics so much. In my simpleton mind, too much politics lead to wars and wars invariably lead to tremendous unjust human suffering. I saw the pics taken from 1940 -1945 where Jews were conned onto genocide trains. They were promised a better life. The minute the train arrived, the males and females separated. They were told they had to take a bacterial bath and made to strip in masses in "bathing" rooms that were done up with fake shower facilities. Then they were hustled past the bathing rooms into chambers and gassed to death in thousands. Through the little ducts, the soldiers poured Cyklone K gas. The deceased's belongings were still left at the side of the train when all this happened.

I hated every minute of the tour but it was necessary for a bigger perspective into my own life. The perspective gained was choice. I have a choice of how I want to suffer. These individuals, killed in a variety of ways, such as through Cyklone K, bullets to the back of their heads, hanging, torture, didn't. They all got on the train for one reason, to live. They were all killed for one reason. They were Jews.

The entire camp brought an involuntary tear from my Polish guide's eye, when we were at another genocide camp, Birkenau. I had to stop and stare because even after thousands of tours she has conducted, repeating the same story over and over, on a daily basis, it still brought pain to her heart. Might she have lost a loved one? Might she still be mourning the loss of her people who were tortured senselessly?

I think back to the people I've known with love of war ideals, nazis, swastika signs on their clothing or bags, love of killing machines, and I wonder. Would these same people still think it was cool to be associated with these insignias, or that such history was fascinating, if they stopped to really think about what and where it derived from? Seriously... stop and think for a minute the pain and suffering others had to go through with these same tokens we now seem to worship as a fashion statement. Think of the fear it struck in these innocents' hearts whenever they saw a soldier, a swastika sign, a coloured bandana, a tattooed number on the forearm.

I apologised to the photos hung on the walls. I had to apologise for what monsters had done to them and their family, for the senseless fear and suffering that they had gone through, for my inability for reparation to them today. All I can do is walk past and listen to stories that mean nothing to me in modern day life. All I can do is take a picture of the horror and empathise for all of 2 seconds. All I can do is sit here and admonish how bad war and torture is.

For those who have died without ever having been given a fighting chance, I am sorry.
Please know that your deaths have not gone to vain. Please know that your deaths have given me all the answers I ever need in this lifetime.