A genuine stroller of city streets

I shall never forget the day I visited Auschwitz-Birkenau in Poland; that was the day I finally travelled to the dark side of the moon. In just half an hour south from Krakow, I reached the modern gates of Hades. The iron sign at the main entrance "welcomes" you with its cynical motto: "Arbeit macht frei". Well, not really; the more you worked, the more exhausted you ended up, which in many cases caused your own extinction. As I entered the concentration camp there was no Cerberus. No three-headed dog guarding the entrance of the underworld to prevent the dead from escaping and the living from entering. No Hercules around to kill the beast, since the beast (nazism) is already dead. Is it not?

I walk around the perimeter fences which were "decorated" with another sign: "vorsicht hochspannung lebensgefahr", meaning "caution, high voltage danger". This "high voltage" and the barbed wire though couldn't prevent at least 1,1 million souls from ascending to heaven. I stand there electrified...

In Auschwitz, it almost keeps raining day and night throughout the year, says the man at the ticket office, as if the weather is constantly mourning. A group of school children from Israel visiting the site are praying in a circle. I see tears drops in their eyes mixed up with the rain. Even if it is summer, it is foggy and unpleasantly chilly.

As I was wandering around the gas chambers, I bumped into a group of Greek tourists who were taking a naive picture of each other shouting "Smiiiile" in front of the specially built “Death Walls”, the so-called “gravel pits”, where many prisoners were shot in pairs after they were stripped naked. I felt ashamed on their behalf. I met them again at the block where the prisoners' personal belongings and human hair are kept and displayed. The latter were used to produce carpets to keep the houses warm. Beware of Greeks taking pictures. Alas!

I found an empty seat in the lounge car of the train back to the medieval town of Krakow. The train passed by many green fields with vegetables, rivers and irrigation canals. This idyllic scenery was quickly forgotten, when I read in my guide book that human ashes from the crematoria were scattered around this area to fertilise the soil or to build river banks. The vicious circle of life: death fertilises the soil to give birth to something new.

Fellow inter-railers in the same lounge car also sat silent, as if they were praying in a circle.