After a big day in Krakow the day before where we explored the Old Town in snow as well as the Wawel Castle and the Wieliczka Salt Mine, the kids and I were looking forward to a more relaxed day today. Of course everyone was still up early at just after 7am, despite not needing to be anywhere in a hurry.

Anto had decided to do a day trip to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps, which meant a 6am departure for him. We’d decided concentration camp tours were too heavy for kids, so the rest of us would stay in Krakow and do some more relaxed sight-seeing.

After a few really long days with lots of walking we thought we’d have an easy day. We’d had plenty of snow and cold days but today started out at zero degrees and we didn’t rush out so by the time we headed out it was almost 5 degrees and the snow was melting a bit. This meant we were getting dripped on all day.

The Old Town and silly hats….

We went back to the main square (Rynek Główny) to find crowds everywhere, even early, which was a contrast to the previous day. We also saw pretty much everyone wearing paper crowns. People were on stage singing Polish folk songs and Christmas carols and some quick googling revealed it was a Epiphany or Three Kings Day …. and a public holiday, hence the festivities and crowns.

Our Polish is non-existent so we had no idea what they were singing about but it was very festive and the kids enjoyed the singing and dancing.

After enjoying watching the singing for awhile, we did some souvenir shopping in the cloth hall and tried not to ice skate on the melting snow on slippery cobblestones. With some new Krakow souvenirs purchased it was off to chase the pigeons in the main square along with all the other kids.

The paper crowns were everywhere and apparently taking a photos of yourself in your crown was the thing to do!

We wandered around the Old Town a little more. It was rather different to the previous day with far more people and a lot less snow! A lot of the shops were closed due to the public holiday but there were still plenty of restaurants and cafes open.

We even found a bagpiper in the streets. Not very Polish but it made bagpipe obsessed Soren happy!

Strudels and lunch pancakes…..

After a bit more of a wander around the Old Town and we were hungry so the kids voted they wanted to try the strudel at a cafe near our apartment, that we had walked past many times in the last few days. It was a tiny cafe and the owner was happy to give us different strudels to try. The kids wanted apple & rose and a walnut-apple with vanilla sauce.

They were very good and we should have ordered more! The cafe owner had a great chat to us about all the festivities going on for Epiphany day and was excited to hear about our 7 week long trip.

Apparently the strudel was not enough food for the starving children, who thought we should go directly from morning tea to lunch. The next stop was the cafe near our apartment where we thought we’d get sandwiches…… but Soren and Zinnia somehow ended up with pancakes they conned me into.

The Jewish Quarter…..

During our time in Krakow we’d mostly been walking around the Old Town area. I was keen to go and check out the Jewish Quarter – Kazimierz. The Old Town is known for it’s Renaissance architecture, and is indeed very beautiful, but the Jewish district is also popular with tourists for it’s cobbled streets, wall murals, independent shops and many food options. It was the food that motivated the kids. I’d seen there was a place in Kazimierz that sold chimney cakes. We’d enjoyed these in Budapest, so the kids indulged my plan to go for an explore with the promise of more sugary carbs!

Kazimierz is about a 15 minute walk from the Old Town and our apartment was right on the edge of the Old Town so we simply headed in the opposite direction to our normal wanders and quickly found plenty of interesting streets to wander.

We found the street with the food vans selling a variety of Polish delicacies. There were plenty of tasty treats available but the kids had chimney cake desires. Today we tried Salted Caramel and it was delicious.

The Chimney Cake van was doing a roaring trade so we had a bit of a wait as they cooked our cake, but it gave us time to check out buildings in the area. They were quite confused when we only ordered 1 chimney cake for 4 of us, but we’d been eating all morning non-stop. Apparently, despite their giant size you are expected to have one each! This was was pretty tasty so I barely got any as the kids scoffed it rather fast.

Not far from the food vans is Poland’s oldest synagogue, which is huge. We noticed that like in the Old Town a lot of the shops were closed for the public holiday but there were plenty of interesting buildings to look at.

This district does look quite different to the Old Town area and it was interesting checking out the different streets and the variety of different buildings. There were still plenty of people out and about enjoying the public holiday and slightly warmer weather.

We managed to walk a nice loop of about 3km between our apartment, the chimney cake food van, and back to the apartment, checking out plenty of the streets along the way. It was now after 2.30pm so the kids were ready to head back to the warm apartment for some quiet time and to await Anto’s return. The kids had managed to con quite a variety of carb-based foods out of me for the morning but we’d probably walked off most of it with our few hours of wandering.

Auschwitz

Anto did this day trip while I stayed in Krakow with the kids because we vetoed them visiting concentration camps (despite at least the older 2 thinking they wanted to go). We thought this was something that could wait until they are much older which we think was a wise decision as it was confronting enough for an adult.

Photos and thoughts about his day are by Anto.

After a 5.30am alarm it was across the road to the train station for a nice early train of just over an hour and 20 minutes to Oswiecim station (the original polish name for the town). After that I had an exciting walk or ice skate on the very slippery ground – (should have taken the crampons!) to the museum entry located at Auschwitz-I.

Unsurprisingly the tour is fairly hard going, and it kicks off in fine form with a fairly long walk along a rather stark concrete tunnel, in silence, while an endless list of victims are read out over speakers hidden in the walls. You emerge fairly close to the infamous gates with Arbeit Mein Frei above them ‘work makes one free’.

From there on it’s a pretty hard slog through the history of the camps, touching on some history of World War II. We toured through various of the original buildings, mostly in (apparently) a fairly well preserved original condition.

The camps were all surrounded with electrified barbed wired fences, often more than one layer, between the many guard towers.

We learnt about the way victims were collected across Europe and transported to the camp, before a selection process and for 80% an immediate transfer to the gas chambers / crematorium. Notable was the fact that those who were not immediately killed only averaged a couple of months of life in the camps – lack of food and medicine, the climate and intense hard labour, even before collective punishments did not make for long comfortable lives.

Once we finished with Auschwitz-I we caught a bus over to the much larger Birkenau camp – which was huge, apparently surrounded with 18km of fences. It was the location of huge gas chambers, which are now mostly destroyed as the German’s dismantled them before fleeing the camp in an attempt to hide the crimes committed. I found it ‘interesting’ they would even consider trying to cover the camp up as it was absolutely enormous, although given the incredibly small number of the SS and their leadership that were successfully prosecuted for their crimes, perhaps the coverup worked better than I imagined.

These are examples of the beds in Birkenau barracks, each level would hold something like 5 prisoners but more could be crammed in.

During the tour we walked through one of the gas chambers, it was rather hard to not hold your breath knowing what had occurred there almost 80 years ago.

Back in Krakow……

All tired we walked back to the apartment and got back just before Anto, who had made it back around 3pm. We were sitting down for a rest and a hot coffee, and the building fire alarm was going off, very loudly. We are on the 4th floor and couldn’t smell any smoke but decided to grab our coats and go out, just in case.

After about 15 minutes there was no smoke, no fire brigade, no one fussing but there were still loud alarms going. We thought we’d better not go back in just yet and we might as well go for a walk. It was too cold to be standing around.

Unlike our eating tour of Krakow throughout the day, Anto had been feasting on only random train station snacks so was hungry! During his time on the trains, Anto had found a dinner place with Polish food that rated well, back in the Jewish quarter he wanted to try. We walked back that way as the sun was setting and were off having dinner just after 4pm. It was well dark by the time we arrived and the place was full of other people, also having dinner.

Another Polish Dinner…..

We continued to try Polish dishes with Soren trying fish with a side of bread dumplings. I had spinach dumplings, and beetroot and goats cheese salad to share with Zinnia. Astrid had borscht and Anto a giant sausage. We were looking forward to perhaps eating a meal which had non-potato based vegetables soon!

Astrid somehow also conned a giant dessert out of us. The kids had managed an impressive day of dessert eating! We all enjoyed our dinner out in Krakow and had found plenty of nice food in this city.

When we got back to our apartment about 5.30pm the fire alarm was no longer going off and there was no sign of any fires so it was back upstairs. We were glad we could get inside as it was now 2 degrees with an apparent of minus 1 so we were happy not to be out on the street standing around.

It was off to Warsaw the next day so the dreaded packing up had to happen again. It was at the stage of the holiday that we were sick of packing those suitcases but we still had a few more cities to visit and some more adventures to have.

Up next…..

We checked out the impressive Polish Aviation museum which made 2 of the 3 kids happy. We then had a cold and snowy train ride back to Warsaw before finding our rather cool ice skating adjacent apartment.