To remember and not only to commemorate - Irene Eber, Holocaust survivor
I'm in Krakow, Poland. I've been here for two weeks to conduct research for my dissertation (gulp), and I've tried to embody, as much as is possible in the frame of research, the foreign, keen-to-see-everything and ask-a-million-questions Tourist. At the same time, I'm completely aware of the weight of the time that I tour and the history it holds; that my imposition as a tourist is by necessity in dialogue with this.
Wherever you look there are signs advertising an excursion to Auschwitz at various prices, nay 'bargains'. Guides stop you at every corner asking if you'd like a tour of the old Jewish quarter or a trip to the sites of the ghetto. Students earning summer pay try to hand you flyers about Schindler's Factory and the local concentration camps. One tourist I spoke to exclaimed how it was all so much less Disneyfied than they were expecting.
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| Staircase and courtyard in Kazimierz, Krakow made famous by Spielberg's 1993 film, Schindler's List. |
You can get to Auschwitz via bus, train or taxi. We get the train.