A sobering experience - Auschwitz - TravBuddy

Starting this review has proven quite difficult solely because there are some parts of this place that you have to witness for yourself, and if I tried to put them into words, I would feel that I was a) ruening your experience and b) disrespecting those that were there. I use the German name for the location, because despite being in Poland, it was a Nazi camp. It was originally designed to kill Poles, but was changed later on to a genocide camp. Birkenau is the bigger of the 2 camps, so bring your walking shoes, because you will be doing quite a bit of it. Also there is only one crematorium left (rest were destroyed by uprisings). It is tiny but it still has that ghostly feel of a lot of people being executed there. It isnt very far from Krakow, and there a lot of organized tours to get there. If you want to do it on your own, you can take a local train from the main Krakow station to Oscwesciem (spelling is wrong, idea right) and then take a short taxi to the camp. This is something I strongly recommend seeing, if only to give you an idea of the horrors humans are capable of inflicting on each other. Hopefully, there will never be another tradegy like this to go and visit, but I dont hold out much hope for that. Sorry for the more depressing post than usual, but it would a) be to hard to make this cheerful and b) this is not a cheerful place.