Travel from Hungary to Poland. Auschwitz.
Какво е да видиш детските играчки на децата затвроници, да чуеш звука на влака, докарващ хора към сигурна смърт, да докоснеш стените, на които са плакали родителите за своите деца и деца за своите родители четете в този пътепис, част от поредицата пътеписи: “В Пика на Делта: Пътуване до Исландия през Полша и Чехия”
КЪМ ПРЕДНИЯ ПЪТЕПИС —> From Bulgaria to Hungary
More information about the route, costs and all travelogues of the trip can be found here.
Day 2: From Szeged (Hungary) to Katowice (Poland) – 760 km. – 8:30
The next day we got up at 05-06. in the morning because we had a heavy transit program coming up: crossing all of Hungary and the Hungarian-Slovak border (which was missing, but we found out later), then crossing all of Slovakia, then crossing the Slovak-Polish border (which was also missing, and we found out later too) to be right at 2:45 pm in front of Auschwitz. Tickets for Auschwitz are booked through their website (see here) and for most of the day paid organized tours with a guide, guide, and the last 2 possible hours are free, without a guide. Accordingly, I had booked the last possible free appointment and we should not have been late in any case! That's why we left Szeged so early.
Almost all the time we were traveling in Hungary, the traffic was extremely busy with trucks and trucks to infinity. As we said a little while ago, the borders between Hungary and Slovakia on the one hand and Slovakia and Poland on the other hand do not exist, there were no passport checks, vaccinations against Covid19 or PSR tests... We didn't even know when we entered from one country to the other. In Slovakia, the navigation took us to the interior of the country, passing through various villages and fields. To be honest, the Slovak countryside did not make a good impression on me, or rather - it is neither better nor worse than Bulgaria.
I liked Poland better in terms of infrastructure and appearance of the cottages and yards. Poland definitely looked better than Slovakia in my opinion.
In the meantime, it was a lot of fun with the navigation in our car, which was last updated... well, in the year in which the car was produced, i.e. 2012 As we drive on the highway and suddenly the navigation shows that we have to turn left. Yes, but every driver knows that this cannot be done on a highway. Shortly after that, the navigation began to show that we are driving in various fields, crossing rivers, passing over people's houses 🙂 But in fact we are actually moving on a highway that is simply newly built and did not exist in 2012.
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Auschwitz Concentration Complex
Around 1:00 p.m. We arrived at the Auschwitz parking lot in the small Polish town of Auschwitz. We took a break from the long way, we ate. We entered the concentration camp at 2:30 p.m. And we stayed there until around 4:30 p.m. We noticed that it was getting dark as early as 3 p.m., and the street lighting was extremely scarce. It was quite ominous to walk through these gloomy rooms full of piles of glasses, cookware, shoes, toys, and clothes that the prisoners and their children wore before they died here of hunger and torture.
There was a rich collection of photos of everything in the camp. Many ceiling-to-floor rooms had photos of people who were there and died there or people who were there and somehow managed to live until the camps were released. Photos of children and their drawings from the wonderful childhood they had irretrievably lost. We heard the sound of trains that brought prisoners to the camps. We read witness stories to what medical experiments mainly women and children were subjected, especially twins. We heard Hitler's voice. We saw the medical rooms and the Death Wall. We saw the prisoners' bathrooms, toilets and bedrooms.
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Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2-Birkenau
In the city of Auschwitz, the two concentration camps are located - Auschwitz 1 and Auschwitz 2.
Auschwitz 1, whom we visited, was a camp built before World War II and political prisoners and criminals were initially sent there. During the war, however, it was transformed into a place of torture for civilians of various nationalities - mainly Poles, Jews, Czechs, Slovaks. Prisoners were mainly killed by starvation, disease, medical experiments, or were subjected to high labor torture.
During the Second World War, Auschwitz 2 was also built, which is located on the outskirts of the city, and its main purpose was to kill the prisoners more quickly. There is the so-called extermination camp (i.e. 4 gas chambers and 4 crematoriums), as well as the railway line on which the unsuspecting prisoners were transported like livestock. Hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies and homosexuals were kept in the one-story wooden shacks of the camp. More than 1.3 million people became victims of this camp, and according to unofficial data, probably more.
Auschwitz 1 parking is free and that of Auschwitz 2 is paid. We only managed to see Ashwitz 1. It had already gotten dark and we had had our fill of a black chronicle, we decided to skip the second camp.
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City of Katowice, Poland
След “приятната” разходка в Аушвиц, пътувахме още 40 минути до Катовице, където се настанихме в ibis budget Katowice Centrum. Хотелът беше базов, с малки стаи, паркингът се плащаше и нямаше близък вариант за безплатен такъв. Хотелът се намираше приблизително близо до центъра на града. Разгледай други бюджетни хотели в Катовице HERE.
Katowice is a modern city (about 150 years old), without much historical value. That is why the center is made up of malls and shops. A clean and clean city. Here, too, as in the city of Szeged (Hungary), brandy and other alcoholic beverages were brewed outdoors. We ate at the Skarbek mall. It struck us that the homeless people were always with a dog next to them and took care of each other. We also visited the Christmas market, which was interesting but not something WOW.
КЪМ СЛЕДВАЩИЯ ПЪТЕПИС —> Arrival in Iceland. Reykjavik.
