Monday 8th September 2008 – Otmuchow, Poland

It rained during the night and the day dawned depressingly grey. This set the mood for our visit today. In rained most of the time during our journey to Oswiecim or, as it was known in German during the Second World War, Auschwitz.
The concentration and extermination camp known as Auschwitz actually consisted of three major camps and a large number of small satellite camps. The two largest camps Auschwitz and Birkenau are now a museum and it is this that we visited. It is actually free to visit the sites but we opted for a guided tour in order to get a better understanding of what happened there. We all know about the horrific extermination committed by the Nazis in the gas chambers, primarily at Birkenau, where an estimated one million Jews were taken straight from trains to their deaths. However the concentration camps were also used as forced labour camps for Jews, Poles (political leaders, dissidents, academics), gypsies and many others. An estimated half a million of these people were worked to death , died from disease or starvation or were executed by the Nazis. A few survived to tell the world about their treatment. I can't begin to describe the horrors that we discovered today and we kept asking ourselves “how could anyone do that to other human beings?”. It took four hours to tour the two sites and we came away very moved by what we had seen and heard.
We drove three hours to our next campsite, the romantically named 'Camping 42' at Otmuchow, close to the Czech border. It took us some time to locate the site as the ACSI map showed it in the wrong place and there was a total lack of signs in the village. However, the wording said that it was on the side of the lake and, having spotted a sign with a yacht on it, I followed it for about 3km and found the campsite. And very nice it was too. We parked up on the lakeside with a lovely view all along the lake. It was quite late and we watched the sun set over the water – a beautiful sight after the horrors of Auschwitz.
Photos: Flowers mark the end of the Death Railway at Birkenau.