We began our first full day in Krakow visiting the old town with our tour guide Grigory. The remarkable thing about Krakow is that many of the beautiful buildings of the city survived after World War II. With Grigory, we explored several sites unique to Krakow including the Church of St. Adalbert, the oldest church still standing in Krakow built in the 10th century; the courtyard of Uniwersytet Jagiellonsk, the oldest university in Poland where Nicolas Copernic studied and discovered the heliocentric model; and the Wawel Royal castle where Polish Kings and Queens lived until around the 17th century. At the castle Grigory told us the legend of the Wawel dragon, a tale which claimed a beast lived in the caverns underneath the castle, and came whenever virgin girls wearing flower crowns passed by, ultimately eating them whole. The dragon terrorized Krakow for years until one man defeated it by feeding the beast a cow filled with sulfur. Now at the entrance to the cavern there is a real fire-breathing statue replica of the dragon. We watched school children admire the dragon as we sipped famous hot chocolate from the Wawel Castle cafe.
While in the morning we found ourselves in one of the most touristy parts of the city, in company with blue skies and the sun, in the afternoon we traveled to the outskirts of Krakow greeted by dropping temperatures and stormy weather. We looked at what seemed to be a large park, with rolling hills and people strolling with their dogs. However, we soon learned that the land had much more significance to it than a plain park. Prior to World War Two, the park was one of the largest Jewish cemeteries in the city, a site more holy to Jews than the synagogue. Yet in 1943 the Germans transformed the burial grounds into a massive concentration camp. Our guide Helena walked us through what is left of the camp, which is to say almost nothing at all. While much of the actual infrastructure has been destroyed, Helena vividly evoked the horrors from the camp through the testimonies of inmates. For me the most striking thing about the tour is how the Germans did everything in their power to extract dignity from the lives and ultimately the deaths of the Jews in the camp. Prior to the War, the site had an enormous funeral home, again one of the most holy places in Judaism. Yet when the Germans arrived, one of the first things they did was to place horse stables and a pigsty inside the building. They also destroyed almost all of the headstones in the camp, and used the broken pieces as the floor of the camp bunkers.
Despite the horrors, through the diaries and testimonies of the people living in the camp we learned that many people were still able to hold on to pieces of their individuality. Even clinging on to the smallest pieces of themselves made surviving a little bit easier.
