088 - Chapter 88

(Illustration: The main square in Krakow)

We saw for ourselves when we visited Krakow in 2018, evidence of the hatred and prejudice that brought about the Holocaust in World War II, where millions of Jews were murdered. Some parts of Poland were a shock to the system, the antithesis of all we’d seen in the United States. Parts of it were sombre and sad, but not all. Krakow itself was beautiful. Here we visited the Main Square, with its bronze sculpture of a huge head on its side, the ‘Eros Bendato’, sculpted by a post-modern sculptor Igor Mitoraj, portraying the fragility of human life. We visited the castle and the ancient deep salt mine, with its magnificent sculptures below ground, and its creaky claustrophobic lift which could only carry a small handful of people at a time, from the bottom of the mine back up to the surface.

We walked to the Jewish quarters of Kazimierz where numerous scenes of Schindler’s list were shot, and there we visited Oskar Schindler’s factory museum. We saw the well-known Eagle Pharmacy, where the pharmacist and his staff had heroically assisted the Jews in their desperate need in the ghettoes. This shop was on the Ghetto Heroes square, where seventy chairs now stand empty as a reminder of what was left behind by way of furniture, when the ghettoes were cleared, and Jewish men, women and children were herded off to the concentration camps. In museums in Poland, and also in the Schindler factory museum, we saw photographs of happy lives once lived, photos of the ghettoes, former synagogues, faith artefacts and ruins. Saddest of all were the faces of those whose photographs were taken inside the camps.

German flags, uniforms and weapons and also their propaganda posters, were also on display.

We also visited Auchwitz and Berkenau, horrendous former concentration camps under Nazi rule, places so horrendous I won’t be posting any photos of them out of respect for the dead. Even now there’s an unbelievably heavy oppressive atmosphere there, where no-one seems to utter a sound as visitors take in what they see. Even birds keep their distance.

You walk around horrified, wondering how could such evil places like this ever have existed, built for the sole purpose of wiping out a whole race of people. Behind glass, were separate displays of masses of shoes, spectacles, clothing, suitcases, utensils, passports, even hair, similar to what we saw in Jerusalem actually, in the Yad Vashem museum. All of these things had belonged to real people, but to the enemy, such were mere numbers.

It beggars belief.

Whichever way you view it, war is obscene.