Current Music: Marco Borsato - "Slaap maar"

Well, I made it back from Poland. Lots of adventures to tell! A total of 3 buses and 8 trains… you better believe there are adventures. :) So this is going to be very very long; I apologize in advance. But here are the high points: as I SMSed to P, D, M, and S – never go to Poland without (a) an interpreter, (b) very warm clothes, (c) a lot of zloty coins, and (d) SOMETHING TO DO DURING SIX-HOUR STOPOVERS!

Keep reading for the details.

OK, so I left at 13.42 on Wednesday and the first train – to Duisberg – really had nothing noteworthy except that there was this guy a couple of rows back singing, in heavily German-accented English, “Cross the water… cross the waves…” but at about one-sixth of the song’s normal speed. And the two women across from me found it as amusing as I did – we kept looking at each other and grinning.

Second train, Duisberg to Berlin. That train was cool for one reason: Dutch people! I was waiting for the bathroom and there was a young mother walking around with her little girl, about 1 1/2 years old – you know how kids that age are, they like to walk, even if it’s just back and forth. Which is what they were doing, with the mother carrying on a monologue the whole time – you know how moms are. So I was just standing there and smiling at the girl once in a while, but then when they came closer I realized that the mother was speaking Dutch to the girl and not German. (I must have said “Sorry, I don’t speak German” about 100 times on this trip… LOL!) So I started listening. And then the little girl just walked right up to me and grinned and waved Hi. So I of course smiled and waved back and then said “Zij is echt een schat, hoor!” to the mom. Then it was finally my turn for the bathroom, but when I came out, they were still walking there, and the girl got confused for a second as I walked past because there were two women next to her, so she grabbed my hand instead of her mom’s. Then she looked up, saw me, and let go. I just smiled again and said ‘Doei!’ to the baby and walked back to my seat, but as I went, I heard the mom still talking to the baby, and she said, “Zij was ook Nederlands!” meaning me. I couldn’t stop smiling for the rest of the trip. :)

Third train: Berlin to Katowice. Here’s where things really got interesting. I was ever so briefly alone in my train compartment – wonder of wonders – thinking, “Wow, maybe I can get some sleep after all.” I had no sooner taken out my contacts when two older woman walked in, and one of them asked me a question in German which I didn’t fully catch but which included the words “vrije plaats” (German is ‘freie platz’ or something I think, maar ja.) so I had to say yes. (Oh yeah, English: literally ‘free place’, as in, is there room here?). So they stayed in there with me. One was about 65, the other about 80. And here’s the funny part: the younger one spoke Polish and German but no English, the older one spoke Polish and a little English but no German, and I spoke English and Dutch (and Spanish, OC, but that’s a nonissue here) and no Polish. Well, OK, about 5 words of Polish, thanks to Izabella, only one or two of which I remember now that camp is over, LOL! But anyway, the point was, we could all talk to each other well enough – using ‘pidgen’ versions of whatever our common language was, plus a lot of sign language and even a few drawings – but we couldn’t all three talk at the same time. Lots of translation going on there, dus. Interesting situation! Slow Dutch, combined with what little German I know, worked OK with the younger woman, and slow English with lots of sign language worked for the other one. But the funny thing is, I started understanding Polish! Maybe I just thought I did, but I noticed certain words that were similar to either Dutch or Spanish and then once someone translated to me what they were talking about, the translation made sense. I mean, I couldn’t follow a conversation or anything, but I caught words here and there. Like, the younger woman would say something to the older one in Polish and then gesture at me and say something that sounded like ‘proberen’. So I guessed that she was saying “Try to explain it to her”, and I asked and I was right! :) Stuff like that. And I could follow German, too – not so well from that woman, but for example, the one who came to our compartment to check our tickets was easy to understand. She had to sell the older woman a ticket, too, as it turned out, and was really getting annoyed because the younger woman had to translate for the older one and they kept asking questions and wouldn’t just buy the ticket – she was saying things like, “I don’t have a lot of time here!” and “So does she have it or not?” (meaning a ten-cent coin) She was young, 20s, and she kept rolling her eyes in my direction, like I was an ally. Pretty funny.

Anyway, that was fun for a while, but after a couple of hours especially the older woman started to get really annoying. (She even wrote down her address and phone number and insisted that I call her.) And I was so tired that I was speaking in the wrong languages to the wrong people. So I finally persuaded them to shut up and let me go to sleep, but then around 2.30, we noticed that the heater wasn’t working in our compartment, so we got up and moved. Oh, and did I mention that they woke us up to ask for tickets and passports like six times??? Tickets 3x, passports 3x. OK, so once at the German-Polish border, that’s fine, I understand, but where did the rest of that come from? I was annoyed. So yeah, not much sleep to be had there. And then to top it off, they ‘pulled a Granddaddy’ (Mom knows what I mean :)) and got all worried about me being by myself in the train (since they got off before me, around 3.30) so they started talking to this man (in Polish, OC) and made him stay in the compartment with me. Which was extremely annoying – first because he spoke not one single word of English, and second because I’m not the naïve little baby that older people always seem to think I am. Sigh. The one thing he was good for was telling me (when he got off) something that sounded like, “Stapze, dan Katowice!” – meaning there was one more station first, called something that sounded like Stapze but was really spelled differently – and then my stop. But I confirmed that with a random person in the hall, just to make sure. :) Polish train stations are not at all well marked the way German and Dutch ones are, and it would have been very easy to miss it.

So I got to Katowice, walked right across the platform onto my train to Oswiecim (at least one transfer went smoothly!), arrived there an hour later and walked into the station, thinking “OK, so far so good – now find an ATM, get some zloty (Polish money) for the bus and the bathroom, and then be on my way!” Well, guess what. No ATM. That’s right – in a train station, no ATM. So I tried to see if the woman in the bathroom would take Euro coins and we couldn’t understand each other. So I gave up and tried one of the ticket sellers – no English there either. Then a couple of people about my age who were waiting for buses – also no. It was ridiculous! I mean, I know I’m a little spoiled since the Dutch are among the best in the world with language, but this was truly absurd – English is the most useful world language to know right now, especially if you work in a train station in a town that gets so many foreign visitors! (And if you asked any random street people if they spoke English, their response was a knowing look and “Auschwitz?” I felt like a real tourist… sigh… don’t like that feeling.)

Anyway, I knew Auschwitz was within walking distance and I knew the people there must speak English, so my main problem was the bathroom. I kept thinking, “If they’re going to charge me for the bathroom and then not give me a way to pay them for it, then I have no problem with popping a squat behind a bush!” Which I fortunately did not have to do, but the possibility was definitely there…

So I set out walking for Auschwitz. The train station map had that clearly enough marked, all right, but they didn’t clearly mark where the station was (duuuuh) so there was no way to get my bearings. (I even knew the word for ‘station’, although I can’t remember it now – ‘stadzji’ or something – and even that didn’t help.) I finally just decided to start walking and go in the same direction as the buses, and then I found a road called ‘something Oswiecimia’ and I knew that Oswiecim is the Polish spelling of Auschwitz, so I knew I was OK then.) Anyway, the people in the Auschwitz museum changed a little money for me and then all was well.

So now we get to the description of the actual camps. (For those who don’t know, Auschwitz is really called Auschwitz-Birkenau; Birkenau is also known as “Auschwitz II”, and that part of the camp is where most of the mass murder took place. There was also apparently a third, much lesser known part which is not open to the public.) So I saw Auschwitz first and it was… well… overrun with schoolchildren, first (about 16-18 years old; anyone under 14 is not allowed in), but second, disappointingly ‘altered’. It’s hard to connect this Auschwitz with the grainy black-and-white pictures we all have in our heads. I chose to go look around on my own rather than wait 2 hours for the guided tour in English (it looked like it was going to rain and I desperately wanted to take pictures) so off I went. I took a million pictures; hopefully some will come out well. (Lots of digital ones too - I'm dying to have my computer back so I can see them full-size.) But as I said… altered. The place is a real museum now, not just the preserved remains of what was once there. About half of the “blocks”, where the inmates lived, have been turned into exhibits, with lots of big modern museum-type boards with pictures and maps and writing. But there’s also some original stuff - old beds in one part, pictures in another part, prisoners’ clothing and a few personal items, and one room that actually had hundreds of thousands of kilograms of women’s hair encased behind a glass wall. You could smell hair as soon as you walked into that room. There were also things like scaled-down models of the camp and old cans of Zyklon-B. Each block has a ‘theme’ – living conditions, for example, or extermination, or geographical statistics or something. There are also entire hallways with rows and rows of framed pictures of inmates, all in their striped pajamalike uniforms. Under the pictures it says the name, date of birth, date of internment, and date of death. Some visitors have stuck flowers behind a couple of the pictures – relatives, I suppose. There was also a big memorial in the courtyard next to block 11, with flowers and candles. And, of course, the iron ‘arbeit macht frei’ (= lit. ‘work frees’) above the entry gate. The thing is, though, that you always picture that as being a sort of standalone thing, with barbed-wire fencing stretching away from it on either side. But it’s not; there’s a building on the left side of it and it’s smaller than you expect and there’s a traffic-control arm in front of it and, well, it just doesn’t look like the main entryway to such a horrific place! Actually, the whole place is pretty small – surprisingly so. I wished I had Rena’s Promise with me so I could see which block she’d been in, but I didn’t have it, so I just peeked into all of them. (Did you know they even had ‘standing cells’, too small to lie down in, for special punishment?)

I spent a couple of hours there, trying to wander on my own, away from the school groups. I did succeed a couple of times, but once, there were so many kids crammed into one building (the one with the hair and the starvation statistics) that I literally could not find the door. I got frustrated (I’d had about 2-3 hours sleep and was not in the mood to have kids further mess up an experience that already wasn’t what I’d expected) and sat down on a bench and drank some water and just waited for them to leave. But those starvation pictures – they’re something else. I mean, we’ve all seen them, but I read the caption on one of the massive pictures, one of an emaciated, naked woman. It said that before Auschwitz, she was 160 cm and 75 kg (exactly my size, I might add, which is maybe why I noticed) and that at the time of the photo, she was 25 kg. TWENTY-FIVE KILOGRAMS… one-third of her normal weight. I couldn’t believe she was still alive to have her picture taken.

Anyway, I’d been told that I absolutely had to go to Birkenau, that it was a lot better, etc. I was feeling rather skeptical, but I knew I couldn’t miss it now that I was there, and decided I’d go right then (around 11.30) and beat the kids there. So I did, and let me just say, Birkenau is completely different. First of all, it’s enormous. Second of all, forget all these restored blocks and brick structures and stuff that Auschwitz has. Birkenau is a huge open plain with wooden barnlike barracks and crumbling brick chimneys stabbing randomly against the sky (they’re all that remains of most of the wooden barracks). I mean, you’re literally climbing over fallen barbed wire to get around this place. There are railroad tracks running down the center of the camp and a huge watchtower right when you enter, from which the SS guards kept watch. I got to go up there (snuck in with the schoolkids – guess they were good for something) but even then, you still can’t see the whole camp. It’s huge! And seems more real.

I wandered on my own, again. And again, there were some startlingly beautiful things (for instance, small yellow flowers growing amongst fallen barbed wire), but this camp really gives a better impression of what it was like to be there. Because it’s so big and empty, you can’t hear anyone else speaking unless they’re right next to you, and it was a gloomy, gray day (though it never really rained) and bitterly cold. I was walking alone amongst the wooden structures that used to be, among other things, bathrooms, and I stopped for some reason – maybe to take a picture, I don’t know. But what I remember is, seeing those schoolkids further up the way, clustered around their guide, solemn-faced - but hearing absolutely no noise, as though someone had clamped earmuffs on my head. And then I did hear a noise – the creaking of the wooden door as it blew softly in the wind. And that was it. Just it; I can’t explain it any better, writer though I am. It made it seem so deserted and eerie. Really, you people need to go see this. You’ll hear the lonesome creaking of the doors, and you’ll shiver from the cold, but all you’ll be able to think about is how much colder the inmates had to have been. And you’ll feel oddly guilty for wearing that coat and hat.

The crematoria were here as well, but the Nazis got nervous near the end of the war and tore them down. They’re way at the back of the camp. There are also areas back here where ashes were thrown, including a pond (popularly called ‘dark water’ or ‘black water’ or something) which contains the ashes of crematoria victims. I didn’t see that, which is my single biggest regret – I had been walking all day, my feet hurt, my back hurt from my backpack, I was freezing, and I couldn’t even see clearly where this place was – far off in a corner of the camp, I believe. So I turned back, but if anybody else goes there… take a look (or a pic) for me, OK? But anyway, there’s also a monument there, between two of the ruined crematoria. I was over by the leftmost pile of rubble, reading the signs and trying to figure out exactly where all of this would have taken place. It’s very weird to realize that, since it’s collapsed, you’re basically looking into a gas chamber (the chambers were underground) and standing just a few meters from the spot where the gas pellets were dropped in. And on the diagram, you can see exactly the places where they entered the underground area, took off their clothes, and went into the “showers”… and then you look to your left and there it is! Really unbelievable; probably the most, um, indrukwekkend part of the whole trip for me. (Indrukwekkend… I learned that word while standing next to those crematoria, actually, and I still can’t think of an English equivalent… “it made the biggest impression”, I guess is what I mean, but ‘impressive’ isn’t the right word… *sigh*.)

Well, anyway, here’s how I learned that word: while I was studying the map, an older couple came up behind me and started trying to figure out the same things… in Dutch! The woman said something like, “So are we next to the entrance now?” She walked over to the ruin while her husband and I stayed in front of the diagram. So I pointed to the end of a long hallway on the diagram and said, “Dat is de ingang, denk ik; en wij zijn nu hier, toch?” and pointed to another place. So the man and I got into a conversation which the woman eventually joined; turns out her husband is a philosophy teacher and has always wanted to see Auschwitz because he knew a few people that were there, and this week is his 75th birthday and her present to him was to fly him to Krakow and spend a week there, and see, among other things, Auschwitz. They were from somewhere near Arnhem. Really nice people! The woman asked, “Ben jij ook Nederlander?” and I had to explain my whole studying-in-Utrecht situation again, and they both looked really impressed and told me, “Jij kunt al best goed Nederlands spreken! Da’s moeilijk…” and so on.

It’s funny how traveling outside Holland makes me feel so much more at home in it. Like, I love traveling, and when I go back to Florida or the US after being somewhere, I never think “Oh, it’s so good to be home!” the way some people do. But meeting Dutch people while I’m in a big cold country where nobody understands English… it makes you feel a bond with those people, you know? And also, me and my phobia of mistakes…well, being so helpless in Germany and Poland made me realize that I *can* handle myself in Dutch. It was such a relief to be back. So I guess P was right… I’m not scared to speak anymore. I absolutely did not expect that to be a benefit of a trip to Poland, but hey, cool anyway. :)

OK, the trip back. Well, I was done a bit earlier than I’d expected so I took the first train I could get from Oswiecim to Katowice, at about 16.30, instead of the 20.30 one that I’d planned for at home. But then I got a nasty surprise in Katowice – only 2 trains to Berlin run per day – one at 9.45 and one at 23.06. I was so angry! But I OC couldn’t do anything about it, so I sat around in a freezing Polish train station for five and a half hours. And naturally I needed the bathroom (twice) and had no Polish coins (and only one bill, which I’m saving…), but the nice thing is, there you pay AFTER you go, so what could they do when I only had euros? ;) Haha… Anyway, yeah, so no benches or chairs or anywhere to wait, just the floor, and it wasn’t a nice station like Utrecht with a heated inside, oh no, this was Eastern Europe, so 4 platforms + underground tunnel connecting them + a few shops at each end = serviceable train station. Completely open to the cold and the wind, and I had to stay there for hours and hours, sitting on the hard cold steps like a bum. Luckily D called then and distracted me (even if he wasn’t calling for a particularly good reason, LOL D!) for at least a few minutes, but then I didn’t want him to hang up – I miss him anyway because we haven’t seen each other in a while, but on top of that, considering I was cold and lonely and mad and very tired, it was so good to talk to someone that I could understand! (But I suppose I’m glad I did hang up… wonder what the charge is for international calls to and from Poland?… :S) All I could think was, ik wil naar huis! (My Dutch home, I mean - not America. :)) Time has never gone by that slowly, not even when I was a little kid on Christmas and Catie and I would wait for it to be 7.00 so we could wake Mom and Dad up. At that point it was like, please just let this be over now! But then I was thinking in Dutch instead of English and that made me laugh and then I got the Acda en de Munnik song “Naar huis” stuck in my head and I somehow waited it out. :)

So, the overnight train - when I finally got on it - was a half hour late getting to Berlin for some reason, so I missed my train to Amersfoort by 15 minutes. “Annoying, but no real problem,” I thought, “Berlin’s a huge city [really, it has about 10 train stations] and I can get to Utrecht from pretty much anywhere in Holland, so there’ll be another one soon.” Uh, no. The only train that runs from Berlin to NL is bound for Schiphol, though it makes a few other stops on the way (Deventer, Amersfoort, etc.), so I had to wait for the twin of the train I’d just missed – four hours later. So I stumbled downstairs and discovered that Berlin Zoologisch Garten (the station) does have heating in the shop area, so I bought snacks from the vending machine (they had waffles in there! How cool is that?!) and changed my clothes in the bathroom (1.10 euro! Highway robbery!) and sat by the elevator reading The Little Friend (yeah, my book order thankfully came in to Broese the exact morning that I left, so I had books) until it was time to go. And when I saw the platform sign switch over to list places I knew, etc., I got the biggest grin. (D: the BSG strikes again!) So, rode to Amersfoort, bought an Utrecht ticket (by myself at the loket for the first time), and came home. Total delay time: almost 10 hours. My reward: a kaassouffle out of the wall. I burned my tongue on one once and I was somewhat lacking in taste buds for about three days, but they’re still lekker. (Shut up, S. :)) Anyway, so I got home around 19.00.

The verdict: it was worth it, especially considering it's a chance I'll probably never get again. But I'm definitely beginning to see why D hates trains - the whole traveling fiasco sort of distracted me from really thinking about what I had seen. And I still want to go to Mauthausen because apparently that's the one that's still almost exactly like it was. Plus, it's a lot closer. But I'll wait a LONG time before I do that, thank you very much! :)

New idea: I want to make a scrapbook about my time in Holland, but not a big unwieldy one - more like an oversized journal; one where you can write on the pages and have spaces for pix. I have lots of stuff to put in there (that’s why I saved the zloty bill). Maybe tomorrow…

Closing thought: Boswell test Monday and Tuesday! That’s the end test which judges if I can pass to the next level, CII. I’m not really worried, but I *am* hoping I’ll get interesting things as speaking topics, etc. Most of this stuff is so boring that I can’t even pay attention to it in English.

OK, it is BEDTIME!!! My own bed… *sigh of rapture*