Friday 13th: Auschwitz/Birkenau

In the Western World the Jewish holocaust represents the most extreme and reprehensible war crime ever committed. Exact numbers do not exist, but a minimum of 6 million people, mainly but not exclusively Jews, were systematically exterminated by the Nazi regime during WW2. Most of these killings took place within their network of concentration camps.  Auschwitz/Birkenau was the most productive of these, accounting for some 1.5 to 2 million deaths.

Having read some of this background beforehand, what do you expect this place of evil deeds to look like? We followed our guide into Auschwitz camp, through the gates with the infamous wrought iron inscription “Arbeit Macht Frei” (Work Brings Freedom).

It doesn't look too bad, does it? A few blocks in, we turn right. Another view: it could be a 1960’s housing estate. Explanation: it wasn’t built as a concentration camp, but as a Polish army barracks in the 1930’s. It was commandeered in 1939 for use as a prison for opponents of the Nazi regime and for potential slave labour. This is that ‘down your street’ photo.

In a way, its ordinariness makes it more sinister. From early 1940, with the appointment of enthusiastic commandant Rudolf Hoss, the camp started taking in numbers of Poles and other ethnic groups; also Russian prisoners of war after June 1941. The regime was harsh and many died from beatings, overwork and undernourishment both in the camp and at their allotted slave workplaces.

There was a punishment block, Block 11, where summary justice was administered and where infringers from outside the camp were also brought to be tried. The verdict was almost invariably death, and they were shot against this wall. The total was in thousands. Dreadful punishments were also administered often with the same final result.

Block 11 also saw the trial of the use of Zyklon B (cyanide) gas as a killing agent in September 1941. It was used on 250 Polish political prisoners and 800 Russian POWs. After the war the empty gas canisters were discovered. It makes a chilling display.

There were so many Russian POWs by the summer of 1941 that it was decided to construct a further camp next to Auschwitz. This was Birkenau.

A conference of top Nazis in Jan 1942 decided that all the Jews in German occupied territories should be exterminated. A number had died already in ghettos and from random persecution, but this time it would be systematic deportation to specially appointed camps for elimination on an industrial scale.

One gas chamber only remains intact, at Auschwitz, because it was converted into a bomb shelter when production-line extermination work was transferred to Birkenau. The four Birkenau gas chambers were all destroyed.

This is the remaining one: the Zyklon B gas was administered through vents in the roof.

The crematorium was next to the gas chamber for efficient disposal of the unfortunate victims’ bodies.

At the new Birkenau camp the deportees were brought by rail directly into the camp. The tracks are still there. They came in sealed cattle trucks often for hundreds of miles, travelling without food, water or sanitation.

A photo taken at the time shows the de-training process. There was no panic for the people arriving  believed they were being resettled into work camps. In fact they were screened on this very platform by Nazi doctors as to their fitness for slave labour. About 25% were passed and the rest were directed straight to the ‘cleansing house’. This was a big room made to look like a shower block, but was in fact a gas chamber. The doors were locked. Nobody survived: up to 2,000 perished in each batch.

 The victims had been encouraged to take their portable valuables. These were now sorted by the slave workforce, even hair was cut off and gold teeth removed before the bodies were cremated. We were shown literally mountains of shoes, suitcases and human hair but were asked not to take photographs out of respect.

The slave workers were housed in wooden or brick huts at Birkenau. These were nothing like so well appointed as the Auschwitz ex-barracks. Up to 90.000 at any one time were accommodated. They slept on three-tiered bunks, about 7 or 8 to each compartment. With flimsy clothes and poor heating in minus 20 degree winters, starvation rations and constant brutality, the mortality rate was high.

The camp was liberated by the Russians in January 1945. Only 7,000 prisoners remained; the rest had been marched out to walk west towards Germany just beforehand. It was the coldest winter in living memory: few survived.

This mass genocide is often thought of a crime exclusively against the Jewish race. They were indeed the principal victims; for example 95% of Poland’s Jews were exterminated. But we should not forget that many other peoples suffered. The known, but understated, role-call for Auschwitz/Birkenau is shown below.

Our visit was a sobering experience. It’s an excellent idea to get people of all ages to understand what happened in these dreadful places in the hope that it may modify our treatment of other human beings in the future. 

June 9th: to Krakow

To get from Budapest to Krakow by the most direct route means crossing the full width of Slovakia. This was a surprisingly pleasant journey, on normal roads rather than motorways. The countryside was green and gently undulating to start, getting steeper and more picturesque as we crossed into Poland through the lower slopes of the Tatra Mountains.

Krakow itself was little more than an hour from the Polish border and we found our campsite quite easily.

Our first trip out was to the salt mine at Wieliczka near Krakow. The photo shows a typical underground passage from the total of 300 kilometres of galleries on several levels excavated in over 500 years of mining. The two hour guided tour of course covers only a small fraction.

You read that Stalin sent political prisoners to the salt mines, so it could be expected to be a terrible place to work. Not so; the galleries were wide and the salty atmosphere healthy. The wooden props are perfectly preserved by salt so don’t rot and become unreliable. Compared to coal mining, it’s much more pleasant, and here in Poland it was reckoned to be a good, well paid job.

But there were dangers from methane gas as in coal mines. Below is a reconstruction of how they dealt with it, by igniting the gas near the roof where it collected. This could itself cause a damaging explosion if the pocket of gas was bigger than expected. We were told that such an even happened in this very cavern, as evidenced by the still blackened roof.

The salt was shaped into cylindrical rolls weighing around one tonne and dragged or winched to an assembly point before being hauled to the surface. The reconstruction here shows a worker dragging a cart of salt, called a dog because of the noise it made. The guy looks like he’s wearing a space suit from a 1950’s sci-fi film about mining on Mars.

The mine has a unique feature: a church carved out of salt in a huge cavern. A few photos will illustrate but can’t really convey its size. The first is the pulpit.

Next, a copy in relief of Leonardo’s The Last Supper, size about 12ft by 6ft.

These chandeliers are also made of salt, approx. 6 ft across.

I always thought rock salt was too soft a material for carving but the guide said it’s as hard as marble and hard work to excavate. So watch out you don’t lose a filling with your fish and chips.

The next photo, near the end of the tour, shows a small underground lake where tourism in the mines first began. The plaque says early 19^th century. The visitors, wealthy, prominent people, were ferried down the tunnel to disembark in a grotto. One day one of the boats capsized trapping the occupants underneath. Because of the very high salt content of the water they could not dive out from under the boat and suffocated when the oxygen ran out. So the trips stopped and tourism went into mothballs until recent times.

The usable space in the mine is vast. There are shops, a cinema, a health farm- even a concert hall. We had lunch down there too in the big cafeteria where you would perhaps expect pay higher prices, but was actually very reasonable, for example tomato soup + roll was the equivalent of £1.20.

We had climbed down to a depth of about 150 metres on wooden steps at the start and during the tour, but at the end gratefully returned to the surface in a small cramped lift.

It was an unusual and informative trip, and certainly well worth its salt.

June 8th: The Hungarian Open-Air Museum

The museum is 3 miles from the campsite, and we decided to a visit on Whitsun Sunday when lots of additional events were taking place.

The museum is an open-air collection of traditional buildings from all over Hungary, on the same lines as one we had visited in Wales, the Welsh Folk Museum near Cardiff.

This is an example from the vast range of buildings. It was helpful that many of the descriptions were in well written English especially when trying to follow the processes of, for example, a dye works or the types of carts and carriages used down the ages. 

However, it would be fair to say that after a while the different building styles and regional variations tended to blur together, which was perhaps inevitable unless you knew a lot about Hungary’s regional diversities or were prepared to swot up extensively before going.

There were some exceptions, though. This is a recognisably different, a Tartar yurt that was being erected.

But where does the yurt fit in? The Mongols (or Tartars) invaded and devastated Hungary in 1241. The following year they retreated due to the death of their leader, but a few remained. These number today about 6,000 and, whilst happily integrated into Hungary, they have retained their traditions and Mongolian appearance.   

This next photo shows a well-to-do family room. What’s odd is the floor.

The floor is just beaten earth and seemed to be quite common, in bedrooms too with gleaming white bed sheets. I couldn’t work out how the floor did not become a muddy goo when liquids were spilt or wet feet trailed water in. And how could those sheets stay white.

Now for some of the extra activities. Hungarian dancing featured for most of the day, in well over 30 degree heat. The violin combo backing gave a gypsy feel to some of the dances but others could have been Irish reels- and not a bottle of Guinness in sight. It was all very colourful.

Needlework was another traditional skill featured, producing patterns like those on the dancers’ outfits. The lady here is wearing such a pattern, at the same time painting a stitching design on a paper template. Jane says to notice the beadwork on her hat.

You imagine the needlework is all done by elderly matrons, but not so, as the next photo demonstrates. I bet he’s a dab hand at cleaning, cooking and ironing too. Bet the girls are queuing up.

 Parading through the museum were grotesque masked Buso figures from the town of Mohacs where a pagan ritual is enacted each year to chase away winter. These characters created much noise with bells and rattles, presumably as part of the chasing winter away process and were in fact something of a nuisance. If anything, they had been too successful in seeing winter off as the temperatures were around 90F in old money.

 There were many stalls selling traditional products, and we managed to buy some traditional ice-cream: Magnums. Most welcome in the heat. Altogether, a good day out, but as with most places visited you only absorb a small portion of the cultural information presented.

Tomorrow we leave for Poland.

The Buda Side: 6th June

Castle Hill is a mile long ridge, containing the Royal Palace and Buda old town, looming directly over the Danube. It’s a great defensive position, which accounts for it having been ravaged eighty six times in the last 700 years according to my guide book. The last occasion was in early 1945 when the Red Army and Nazis slugged it out with all the destructive power of modern weapons. So what you see today is a painstaking, faithful reconstruction - and you’d never guess.

We cross from Pest to Buda via the “famous chain bridge” (quote from Hop-on, Hop-off commentary) that I’d never heard of before, but it was quite striking. 

It’s a hot day, so on arriving at the far bank we use the cog railway to ascend Varhegy, Castle Hill to us. This was cutting edge in its day, the second funicular railway in the world when it opened in 1870. It’s now cutting edge restoration as it was hit by a shell in 1945.

At the top you’re right next to the Royal Palace that houses the Hungarian National Gallery, the Budapest History Museum and the National Library. The exterior is magnificent and ornate, but inside the reconstruction is functional and did not seek to replicate the elaborate palace that was destroyed in battle of late WW2.

Strolling into old Buda, the most noticeable feature is Matyas Church. The original building dated from the 13^th century, but it was adapted and altered so many time that the post 1945 rebuild hardly seems to matter. During the 160 years of Turkish occupation it was even a mosque. It’s beautifully proportioned with a patterned tile roof.

Inside the recreated colour scheme is overwhelming. It looks like mosaic at first glance but is in fact painted: every bit of wall and ceiling, and it’s stunning.

 Outside, next to the church and overlooking the river, is the Fishermen’ Bastion. The fishermen in the Middle Ages apparently stoutly defended this part of the town. But not from the Bastion, that’s a later decorative addition. It looks the biz though. What’s wrong with a bit of Disney?

We take another look at the view from the Palace terrace. It’s a terrific panorama of Buda, Pest and the Danube, which is definitely not blue, more a muddy brown. You can’t get all of that in one photo, so this is us with the backdrop of Pest, the Danube AND the Chain Bridge, getting more famous by the minute.

Budapest provided an interesting explore, what you could normally expect from an historic European capital city. It helped that many notices, leaflets and other communications were in English because Hungarian is not one of the languages you can easily guess, in fact it has no connection with any other language apart from a slight similarity to Finnish. And with that, we finish in Budapest.

Budapest: 5th June

Budapest as a city was created by joining the two towns of Buda and Pest, on opposite side of the Danube, in 1873.

Buda is hilly whilst Pest is flat, and we’ll start with Pest only because the Hop-on Hop-off bus goes there first, and we’ve just hopped on the bus.

From the bus, plenty of elegant buildings drift by that could just as well be part of any European capital. The yellow taxis could be from New York.

We sail past the Gresham Palace, a fine art nouveau building finished in 1904 by a British insurance company. It is now a hotel.

Budapest was occupied by the Turks for 160 years from 1526, so leaving some particular legacies like the Szechenyi Turkish baths. The front looks like a royal palace, and it appears that a favourite pastime, while wallowing in the water, is to play chess. It’s mixed sex, too, so you could take your Czech mate.

This is a building with a more sinister history. First, the HQ of the Arrow Cross fascists in WW2, the Hungarian Nazi Party, then the AVO, alias the KGB, under the communist regime. Now it’s a museum called The House of Terror that commemorates the inhumanities that were committed there.

Hosok Square constructed in 1896 is the area for big meetings and parades. At other times it’s the domain of a few skateboarders, rollerbladers, and pedestrians. That forlorn emptiness could easily be filled by parades of Hop-on Hop-off buses.

Now for some modern architecture. But the ING building looks like it’s cracked into segments and been repaired with bits of wire. Not perhaps the solid image an investment company like ING should be striving for.

 I’ve been neglecting the churches. This is St Stephens Basilica that contains the mummified right hand of St Stephen. This is paraded through the streets on his saints’ day Aug 20^th  when the devout can engage it with a “high five".

The Jewish synagogue here is the second largest in the world, after New York. It’s pretty impressive with an elaborate front and gilded towers.

There can be no doubt that the most stunning edifice from any era here is the Parliament Building, completed in 1904. It has 691 rooms and is 315 feet tall: the largest building in Hungary, and the tallest in Budapest. Not that any of this make for better parliamentary decisions or integrity.

We visit Buda the next day, on foot this time, so we’ll see you tomorrow.

Szentendre Town

Szentendre was one of Huntingdon’s twin towns, and maybe still is.  Huntingdon Town website shows it as currently twinned with Szentendre, but not the other way round!

It’s an attractive town on the Danube that has become a magnet for working artists, about 200 of them. This is the market square, from which radiates a network of cobbled streets.

 Predictably, the main thoroughfare is full of touristy shops and restaurants designed to appeal to the trippers, most of who come by boat or bus from Budapest. Here they are swarming along the High Street.

 To be fair, there are some genuine Hungarian goods on sale as well as the cuddly toys and memento trinkets obviously made in the Far East. This shop is selling only traditional indigo dyed Hungarian clothes. There was even a faded letter in a glass case, dated 1990, from Princess Diana’s lady-in-waiting thanking the shop for presenting Princess Di with some garments.

Taking to the side streets and lanes provided some pretty views that seemed to capture the spirit of the real town more than the crowded commercial areas.

As we walked back to the camp, I thought that Huntingdon’s got some catching-up to do if it wants to attract that many visitors

June 3: To Budapest

The motorway system runs seamlessly from Slovenia into Hungary. Too seamlessly it seems, because at the border there are warning signs against travelling on Hungarian motorways without a vignette (a permit), and there’s nowhere to buy one.

Is this a scam to catch the tourists? We pass a stationery police car. It doesn’t follow. In about 50 miles a sign directs us off the motorway to a hotel that sells them, so all is well.

We are heading for a campsite at Szentendre, a small town on the other side of Budapest. There is no ring road from our direction so we have to go through the centre of the city: Jane drives, I navigate. It is busy, chaotic, and the road surface is rough, but the Hungarians aren’t too aggressive and we get through just fine. Top driving, Jane.

Camping Pap-Sziget is potentially a peaceful riverside site. It’s currently full of school parties that don’t seem to need any sleep. I’m sure we were like that once upon a time, but one doesn’t think quite so charitably at 2.00am.

Now let’s introduce you to Dave who checked in the day after us and set up next door. 

Dave has cycled all the way from Doncaster in the last five weeks, following the course of rivers, currently the Danube that runs past our campsite. Great achievement, but it’s the tip of the iceberg: Dave’s en route to Doncaster, Australia, over the next two years, through places like Kazakhstan, China, South Korea, Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia.  If he’s pedalling past where you live, do give him a wave.