Spent 3 nights in Poland. First night was on a hostel on Katowice. The next morning I got up early to tour Auschwitz. Fittingly, it was gloomy and rained the whole time I was there.

I got there around 8:30am and there wasn’t an English tour until 10:30am. So I decided to take it on by myself. I pretty much followed the Polish tour guides just so I had a general path to hit all of the camp. Luckily most signs were in English so I had some context when exploring. On a train ride, even before I decided I would go to Auschwitz, I read Night by a Holocaust survivor (Ellie Wiesel). I was really glad I had that narrative in my head because it made the camp come to life. I think without reading that book many things wouldn’t have resonated quite as much.

I had a lot of friends ask me how it was and how it made me feel. Honestly, I expected to be a little more somber afterwards. There were something, like seeing the room full of human hair they literally harvested from people, that hit me pretty hard. However, for the most part it was pretty cleaned up and seemed a little removed from the horrors that once happened there. At least in my perspective after seeing the Killing Fields in Cambodia (https://www.wildboom.us/2017/10/15/cambodian-adventures-part-1/). There I saw piles of human skulls and even saw bone fragments still in the grass…

After going through the first camp I took a shuttle bus from that camp to the other main camp that was constructed once the original Auschwitz camp was filled. The other camp was huge… There were horse stables (designed for 52 horse) everywhere that were used to house around 400 prisoners. You could see these stables almost as far as your eye could see. This camp also had a replica train car on the tracks were the prisoners first came in.

After I finished at Auschwitz I hopped on a train north to Leszno, Poland. Here my friend Z picked me up at the station. We are friends back from working together at CMU. He came to the university from Poland on a track scholarship. I guess for a time he was the fastest man in Poland in a certain event. Everyone at Central called him Z because no one could pronounce his real name, Ziemowit.

It was a real chill visit and I spent two nights on the couch in his living room. It was really fun to see his son! His wife was pregnant while he was in his last semester at CMU and I remember him trying to work extra hours to provide for his family. I remember thinking how hard that must have been to be on another continent while your wife is pregnant. So it was a joy to see them all together and happy!

I didn’t do a whole lot with Z besides talk and catch up since he was on daddy duty all day. He did go to the mall with his son and played with him at a play park. I also have to say Polish KFC is much better than American KFC. They have some really awesome chicken sandwiches and they had a promotional Oriental menu as well.

Now, I’m on a bus to Berlin. In Berlin I have a two hour wait before I transfer to another bus to Paris. I intended on meeting up with some of my German friends from my high school foreign exchange program, but with my poor planning we were unable to make it work. Instead I’m going to see if it is possible to get to the Berlin Wall quick during my bus layover.