Auschwitz Concentration Camp

 Auschwitz was one of the places I knew I wanted to visit while here in Europe. It is not glamorous but is is nonetheless amazing. I really like learning about history and growing up I learned a lot about WWII history and the holocaust. I scheduled an all day tour through krakowshuttle.com for a tour of Auschwitz which was about 2/3 of the day and a tour of the Salt Mines which was the last part of the day.

There was a tour guide throughout our whole experience at Auschwitz and I would definitely recommend having a guide. I feel like I learned so much more than what was just displayed. All the displays are in Polish, English, and Hebrew which I thought was a lovely touch to honor the Jewish people that visit the camp. You start at Auschwitz one where it is more like a museum. Many of the buildings have displays of photos, shoes, combs, glasses, and even hair of the prisoners. We saw the exsicution wall and the building were they did experiments on women and children. We also entered a gas chamber.

After that we went over to Auschwitz II which is the main death camp that people think of when they think of Auschwitz. That is were many of the Jews were taken and then killed. We got to see the whole compound from above inside the railroad station. Many of the wooden barracks were destroyed and burned when the liberation happened but a few are still staying and you can enter them and see how people lived, slept, went to the bathroom. We then walked all the way to the back of the camp to see where the gas chambers would have been. Now they are just blown up rumble because the Germans destroyed them before the allies came into the camp.

The day we visited was so cold like 32 degrees or 0 degrees celsius. Our tour guide said it was about -20 degrees celsius in the winter when the camp was liberated. The camp was actually liberated in January of 1945 so I thought it was very fitting to be able to visit around the same time.  I also really enjoyed learning about the camp, holocaust and WWII from a different perspective. Our tour guide was Polish and she lives really close to the camp. As Americans in school we learn about certain things a certain way and while the information isn’t wrong sometimes we don’t have as many details or leave out information that other countries find important. So it was interesting to hear about the history of the time from a Polish person. 

I did not edit my photos at all. I usually brighten the photos up a little bit before putting them into a blogpost but I just thought that these photos don't need that. So these are the photos unedited just as I saw the place through my camera lens and my own eyes. 
love, Carlee