Krakow, Poland (29.7.11)

Sorry for the delay on this post! Because it is a day late, today's post will immediately follow (yay!)

On the 29th of July, 2011, Tim Norman, Daniel Harrison, and Maria Landry woke up at 5:30 AM. They proceeded to walk towards their hostel. They walked for about 30 minutes in the rain without a map. They later discovered that the hostel was about 10 minutes away from the train station (yay 2X!!).

On a serious note, yesterday was awesome. We got to our hostel, checked our bags, and (without a shower) headed to Auschwitz (which I will not attempt to spell in Polish. In fact, I will not attempt to spell anything in Polish for the duration of our stay here. I still do not understand how you can put the letters S, C, H, Z, and P next to each other in a word and still make a word. Where are the vowels?)

Since probably middle school, I have been particularly interested in the concentration camps, death camps, and the Holocaust in general so I had been anxiously anticipating this day for our whole trip. We toured both Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II (Birkenau), which took about 4 hours all together. Auschwitz I was not at all as I expected it to be. It was small, had brick buildings, and only one gas chamber. Birkenau is the death camp most Americans imagine : massive, 4 gas chambers, wooden barracks, and a train track running through its center, where Holocaust victims were separated : those fit to work, and those deemed "unfit" who were taken directly to the gas chambers.

We've all read about what happened during the Holocaust, in fact, some people reading this blog were alive while it happened, so I won't go into all the details of what we learned and relearned on our tour. I will talk about a few of the things that were special to TheTresAmis in general. St. Maximilian Kolbe is very important to me because he was my confirmation saint. He died at Auschwitz I, either from lethal injection or starvation, in the place of another man who had a large family. On our tour, we passed by the cell where he died, which has been transformed into a sort of sanctuary. We did not get to spend as much time with my confirmation saint as we were able to with St. Bernadette or we will be able to with Padre Pio, but I will never forget the moments in which I came as close to Kolbe's life as I probably ever will.

We were particularly moved by the remains of the victims of Auschwitz. In one of the barracks on our tour we saw piles of suitcases, children's shoes, and even human hair that had been confiscated by Nazis before their possessors were executed. Hearing the details of the "experiments" that some of the victims were put through and even the amount of time that some spent in the camps (as little as a few hours before being led to the gas chambers) was also difficult.

Visiting Auschwitz was exhausting. Mentally and physically. However, none of us will regret this stop on our trip.

With disregard to our fatigue (after a poor night of sleep on a train) we made an impromptu stop in at the Sanctuary of the Divine Mercy. We only learned that this even existed a few days before our arrival in Krakow (good work Maria!), and are very lucky that we got to have this experience. We went to mass in the same chapel that houses the remains of St. Faustina. We were ugly, smelly, and improperly dressed (Maria was given a cloth to wear over her legs because she was in shorts... whoops...) Also, we didn't speak Polish. Also, we were in the front row. Also, we were on live TV. We got over all this reasonably quickly (the cameramen just didn't put their cameras on us when we should have been moving our mouths). At the end of mass, we said the chaplet of the divine mercy (in Polish) and venerated the relic of St. Faustina that was on display in the chapel.

Okay, this blog is too long. I'm ending this quickly. Later, we had dinner. It was good and Polish. Tim lost his phone. Maria dried her hair with paper towels. I am still the perfect (Tim disagrees). That is all.

Love you. Miss you.
Daniel