Sunday 5th February 2023 MrShuttle again sent a confirmation of the time of we would be picked up for our visit to Auschwitz and as we would be leaving before breakfast the hotel provided us with a packed lunch each in a brown paper bag. It included such shiny green apples that we felt it must be someone’s job in the kitchen to polish them. Auschwitz is about 70km from Kraków and on board the coach we watched a video about the camps. Auschwitz: a single word synonymous with genocide which conjures up the worst that mankind can do. A single word known the world over. Far from being a single place, Auschwitz was in fact a vast complex of over 40 concentration and extermination camps consisting of Auschwitz I, the main camp or Stammlager; Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and death camp with purpose-built gas chambers; Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labour camp for the chemical conglomerate IG Farben as well as dozens of sub-camps. A single word cannot convey the sheer scale of the site and we both struggle to describe the enormity of this place and therefore sometimes, below, we are indebted to better minds than ours for their words. Robert has visited […]
Daily Archives: 09/02/2023
Sunday 5th February 2023 We planned to go to the Wieliczka Salt Mine in the morning and Oskar Schindler’s Factory Museum in the afternoon. The Wieliczka Salt Mine is about half an hour’s drive outside Kraków and Robert had booked a guided tour through MrShuttle to include transport and entry to the mine. The evening before, he had received a text confirming the booking and telling him what time we would be picked up from outside our hotel. Fortunately, this was later than expected and would give us plenty of time to have breakfast. We were picked up promptly at 09:00 and driven by car to the Wieliczka Salt Mine. It briefly seemed to us as though this must be a very quiet time of year for tourism if there were only going to be the two of us on the tour. However, once we arrived at the mine entrance [see below] we were joined by a minibus full of other MrShuttle customers all waiting for the English-speaking tour. Salt or sodium chloride [NaCl] has been extracted at this site since Neolithic times. The surface water was such a highly saturated salt solution that it was undrinkable and was effectively […]