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Wieliczka
Wieliczka is a suburb of Krakow, a sleepy little village about 10 miles south east of the city centre. Its major tourist attraction is its salt mine (Kopalnia Soli), a UNESCO World Heritage site. Previous visitors have included Tsars and Emperors, so you'll be following in distinguished footsteps. Records show that the salt mine was operational in the 14th century, and was probably in use even before that. It's still operating commercially to this day, and you can go on a guided tour around the upper levels, which are no longer mined.
To get to Wieliczka you can either take a train from Krakow Glowny, which costs less than 5zl and drops you off less than half a mile from the mine, or you can take the LuxBus minibus. These leave from the main bus station and run at least a couple of times every hour, although sometimes the bus will wait until it has a reasonably full load before setting off. to make sure you get on the right they've helpfully put a big sign saying "Salt Mines" on the door. The ride to Wieliczka takes between 20 and 40 minutes depending on traffic and drops you off a 5 minute walk from the mine, and costs 2zl
Once you enter the mine's courtyard you're greeted with an assortment of tat-shops (most of which sell authentic bags of salt), a couple of cafes, a small statue of a miner and, towering over you, the machinery that runs the lift down the main shaft. The ticket office and entrance are sign-posted.
You can only enter the mine as part of a guided group, and groups are only sent down when there are enough people to form one, which means that sometimes you might have to wait around for enough people to turn up. In summer I doubt that you'd have to wait for more than 10 or 15 minutes, and even in winter the mine guarantees that you won't have to wait for more than an hour. We went in late September and waited about 15 minutes (and that was only because another group went down before us so we had to wait for them to get a head-start). The guided tours are in Polish; in summer tours in English (and a few unimportant languages) run periodically through the day and you can pay a bit extra to go on one of these , or you can splash out and hire your own personal guide. If there isn't an imminent tour in English it's easier and cheaper to buy a copy of the tourist brochure, from which you should be able to figure things out anyway. Entrance costs 30zl (and a further 8zl if you want to use a camera, 13zl for a video camera). Once your group has assembled you're marched through the entrance and then down into the depths....
It is estimated that over the centuries nearly 200 miles of tunnels have been carved out, down to a depth of over 300 metres. Naturally, you don't get to see all this. The tour, which lasts for a couple of hours, takes in about 2 miles of caverns and tunnels, and never goes more than 150 metres down. You start off by tramping down stairs to a depth of 64 metres, which takes about 10 minutes (the lazy can pay a lot extra and go down in a lift). Once you reach the bottom of the stairs (and have caught your breath, in my case) the tour proper begins.
You're taken through a series of eerily lit caverns and chambers. The presence of salt is everywhere; some of the corridors and caverns are bare rock, with strange growths of salt crystals looking almost some kind of white moss, and there also thin stalactites of salt crystal. Other chambers are carved out of polished rock-salt. In some of the chambers are carved statues and scenes made entirely out of rock-salt (all the carvings were done by miners). Among others there are statues of Pilsudski, Copernicus, the German poet Goethe (another distinguished visitor), a few Polish Kings, scenes from Polish legend, and even a cavern of dwarves. Some of the caverns show how salt used to be mined here, using models and dummies, and replica equipment and machinery (some of it huge, made out of wood and looking bloody hazardous! Hardly surprising that an alternative to prison in medieval times - and Stalin's USSR - was to sentence someone to labour down a salt mine). Not surprisingly the miners are highly religious and so a couple of the chambers are small chapels that they dug out. Many of the larger chambers are shored up with timbering that wouldn't look out of place in the roof of some great, gothic cathedral; the wood has been so impregnated with salt that it has basically pickled, and is as hard as rock.
Probably the most impressive chamber is the Chapel of St Kinga, a large underground church carved out in the 19th century. Everything is made out of salt, from the crystals chandeliers to the altars and statues (including one of John Paul II). Particularly attractive are the carvings in the church's walls, some showing scenes from the bible (one has a donkey; excellent!), or reproduced works of art (including Michaelangelo's Last Supper). Again, all of the carving here was done by the miners. The acoustics here are amazing, and concerts are sometimes held in the chapel. Possibly the most awe-inspiring chambers are a couple that have underground lakes; the reflection of the dimly-lit water flickering on the polished rock-salt walls is hypnotic.
After a couple of hours marching through a salt-mine you're no doubt going to be thirsty, and so happy news is that there is a cafe and bar at the end of the tour. Apparently the bar is 125 metres underground which I'm pretty sure is the lowest level to which I've sunk in order to have a beer. There's also a small post office and a few more tat-shops down here. For an extra admission charge there's also a museum relating to the history of the mine.
Happily you don't have to walk back up to the surface, the lift is free (although it only goes every half hour; there's a clock in the cafe counting down to the next departure). The lift is the same one that the miners use; it's not for the claustrophobic but it whizzes you back up to the surface quickly, in pitch darkness. To get back to Krakow the Lux Minibus will pick you up from the mine courtyard (there's a bus stop on the right hand side, as you come out of the main building).
Oswiecim
Oswiecim is probably not a name that regular readers of this site will be familiar with. Then again, if you're a regular reader of this site your own name is probably something you're not familiar with. Oswiecim is small, unremarkable industrial town 50 miles west of Krakow. 60 years ago it was possibly the nearest there has ever been to hell on earth, and the scene of the greatest mass-murder ever committed. The occupying Germans had a different name for Oswiecim: Auschwitz.
There are 2 camps today at Auschwitz, although during the war there were dozens of small sub-camps. Auschwitz 1, which was more of a forced labour camp, is the smaller and better preserved. Auschwitz 2, or Birkenau, was purely and simply an extermination camp, its sole aim to kill as quickly and efficiently as possible. It is by far the bigger camp, although large parts of it were destroyed by the Nazis as they ran away from the approaching Soviets in attempt to cover-up what they had done. Both are open to the public and are free.
To get to Oswiecim from Krakow you can either go by train or coach. The train is quicker but there are only a couple of early morning departures from Krakow Glowny, after which trains run from Krakow Plaszow. The train drops you off in the middle of town, from where you'll either have to walk a mile to get to Auschwitz 1, or wait for a local bus to take you. All in all it's probably a better idea to get the coach. They run regularly throughout the day, and will drop you off and pick you up right outside Auschwitz 1 itself. The coach journey takes about an hour and a half, and gives you chance to look at a bit of the Polish countryside and marvel at some of the feats of Polish driving; not for nothing does Poland have Europe's highest rate of deaths of the road. The journey costs 10zl; you can but tickets from the Jordan bus office on ul. Bosacka. Auschwitz 1 and Birkenau are a couple of miles apart; regular buses run between them.
Prior to WWII Auschwitz 1 was a disused Polish army barracks. In 1940 its first inmates were Polish political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war, the later of which were literally worked to death. Before you enter the camp itself there's a small museum which had an exhibition relating to the role of women within the camp, and a cinema which shows the horrific footage shot when the Soviet Army entered and liberated it in 1945.
The camp itself was surrounded by a double line of electrified barbed wire (although when I was there most of the barbed wire had been taken down for restoration), and the perimeter is dotted with look-out towers. You go in under the main gate with its inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" ("Work Makes Free") and from then on you're free to wander pretty much wherever you want within the confines of the camp.
To be honest, looking round the camp as it appears today it's almost impossible to imagine what happened here 60 years ago. The red brick huts, previously prison blocks, appear innocuous, and the wide tree-lined paths and surprisingly tranquil atmosphere combine to almost give the place the feel of a kind of holiday or scout camp. The guard-towers, fence posts, and coils of barbed wire spoil this illusion, and if you actually go inside one of the huts the illusion is totally shattered. Around half of the huts have been turned into museums; some tell of what happened inside Auschwitz. Some of the exhibits, such as piles of shoes, glasses, and an estimated several tons of human hair taken from the camp's victims need no further explanation. Other of the huts are devoted to specific countries, and what happened to them and their population under Nazi occupation. Some huts are devoted specifically to the extermination of the Jews, and one to the gypsies. Particularly chilling is the punishment block, where inmates who were due to be executed were kept. In the courtyard next to this hut, where most of these executions were carried out, is a memorial to the victims of the camp.
Although not primarily an extermination camp the Nazis did conduct experiments in mass murder here using Zyklon B gas. When the task of mass killing was transferred to the newly opened Birkenau the gas chamber and crematorium was converted into an air raid shelter for the camp's guards, but was reconstructed after the war. This is almost certainly the most harrowing part of Auschwitz 1. The gas chamber itself is surprisingly small, about the size of a coupe of squash courts, but it is estimated that tens of thousands of people lost their lives in this one room. Next door are the ovens where the bodies were cremated; it's hard not to think about the extensive soot-staining on the roof and walls in this room. It's a definite relief to walk out into the light and fresh air. With a sense of grim irony the gallows where the camp's Nazi commander, Rudolph Hoess, was hanged for crimes against humanity after the war has been left standing nearby
There is so much to see at Auschwitz 1 that you could easily spend the entire day here, which is exactly what we managed to do, meaning that we didn't get around to visiting Birkenau. Although the Nazis managed to destroy parts of Birkenau, including the crematoria, the camp was so vast it was impossible to destroy everything. The gas chambers and several of the prison huts still stand, although no attempt was made to rebuild destroyed buildings, which have been left exactly as they fell. The stretch of railway line that brought victims to the camp also still survives.
Basics - Getting
There - Getting
Around - Places
to Stay -
Where to Get Drunk - What
to See and Do - Day Trips
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