Poland by www.born2travel.it

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10. 08. 2000 Warsaw (POLAND) Yesterday, morally speaking, I had a terrible day due to a series of events that piled up: Rossho's departure, the drunks of Willach, the fine in Austria, the awful night on the train, the problems with the Lithuanian visa; all I know is that now I feel much better! This thanks to two Portuguese guys "picked up" last night at the Bratislava station, with whom we spent the night journey to Poland. After so long, tonight on the train I rested a bit, thanks above all to Pedro who kept watch for me! I'm very grateful to him. Warsaw is a nice city but nothing special, very industrialised; it reminded me a lot of Milan twenty years ago. We visited the centre, the residence of the President of the Republic, and strolled in the beautiful central square.

[Pedro Daniel Aguiar Lopes from Porto, Portugal]: "Shall we travel together as far as Warsaw?" That's how I met this "mafioso" during the interrail. I hope we'll meet again along this road... Tonight we'll go to Krakow. We'll stay there and early tomorrow morning we'll go to the impressive Auschwitz. I'm excited. 11. 08. 2000 Auschwitz (POLAND) Jews. A people with their own ideals, their own religion, a "chosen" people... But chosen not only by their God but also by a mad Nazi general: Adolf Hitler, who decided to eliminate, to exterminate in the truest sense of the word, that race - so baneful and impure - from the face of the earth. We're on our way to Auschwitz, perhaps the best-known concentration camp of the Second World War.

I'm very emotional, also because my grandfather during the Great War was a prisoner of the Germans in Yugoslavia, and still today, more than fifty years on, when he hears talk of war his eyes redden and his expression changes at once. Many times, with tears in his eyes, he told me of the terrible things that happened in his prison camp, when they fought among themselves to be chosen to work 15 or 16 hours a day in the fields, and only so they could secretly steal a single ear of wheat, a small potato... My grandfather was in a horrible camp, but not in the ones that went down in history for their unheard-of cruelty; besides, my grandfather was not Jewish. Let's imagine the others... And then he was lucky, because he can still recount all these things, unlike thousands upon thousands of boys who never came back from there (including two of his brothers). Auschwitz.

Just the name is frightening. But inside, fear is the only feeling - and the lightest one - you could experience. At the start there's a big gate bearing the words: "Arbeit macht frei" (Work sets you free), but as the guide said: "This was only a painful irony. Everything in the camp was in the service of death, not freedom", or as a German general warned the newly arrived: "In here there is only one way out: ashes!" When the deportees from half of Europe arrived here they found a certain Hans Stilo who immediately decided their fate with a finger; based on age and physical condition, that finger pointed you to work or to the crematorium. More than a million and a half Jews crossed the threshold of this camp in those sad years; only four hundred thousand survived. The Jew, after crossing the entrance gate, was stripped of everything.

In the many "blocks", now turned into museums, all their personal belongings were kept, from glasses to combs, from basins to suitcases, from shoes to prosthetics, from the long hair of the women (shocking) to toothbrushes, etc. At first, to register them, three ID photos were taken, but this "procedure" was soon abandoned because everyone, after three days inside, was completely transformed; so the trick of a tattoo on the forearm or chest was introduced (for men and women) and on the legs (for children, because the numbers were long and didn't fit on a child's small arm). There was a room dedicated to the mad German doctor Mengele, who performed "genetic" experiments on women and children to demonstrate the supremacy of the German Aryan race... Room of punishments and torture. At the start there's a big courtyard with a high wall at the far end. It was the place where people were shot.

Not to mention the torture rooms: whippings, forcing water down the nose, placing metal splinters or nails under the fingernails. There were also cells built in some underground tunnels, poorly ventilated, where the deportees were shut up and then died of asphyxiation and standing up, since they were extremely narrow and there was no room to move. The trees. Those shrubs planted by the Jews and that rose high into the sky, almost symbolising the dignity and pride of that so unfortunate people; stopping, I asked myself: "If these trees could speak... How many different stories, but almost all with the same fate, they would tell...!" Finally our "tour" ends at the terminus: the showers and the crematoria. The showers. People were made to undress completely in an anteroom, first the women, then the men.

Afterwards they were all channelled into a big room whose ceiling had many holes; there they were flooded with a highly poisonous gas that killed them in a short time; the bodies were then gathered and cremated to erase every trace of that people. The rest is silence. At the Oswiecim station we say goodbye to our dear Portuguese friends, who head on to Copenhagen while we head for Prague

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