As I'll have to give a speech today, I thought a few opening words in Polish would be nice and had asked someone to translate them for me so I could practice, but whe I tried them out yesterday on my main contact in Krakow, he looked horrified and declared I sounded like the Pope (the current one, not the last one, whose image is everywhere in this country, btw) which I must not. I could have protested that while me might both be from the German South, he's a Bavarian and I'm a Franconian and so the accent is totally different, but instead I asked for a redraft and some more practice, and so I hope I'll be able to say hello without sounding too papal.

Thursday had a learning theme anyway. You'll see what I mean.

( Colleges, Pendulums and the Mines of Moria )

No pictures here, I couldn’t. Back when the AP s and self decided to make this one week trip through Poland, we wondered whether to go or not, and ultimately decided that we couldn’t not. So the day we were driving from Warsaw to Krakow seemed the right one, because if you visit Auschwitz, you can’t do anything else after. Even so, there is a taint to it – the whole idea of „Monday, Warsaw, Tuesday, concentration camp, Wednesday, Krakow…“ strikes one as perverse. But I don’t think there is a right way to do it.
So. Auschwitz. On the drive there, you cross the railroad several times, and that sight already gives you a faint sense of horror and nausea. We went to Auschwitz-Birkenau first, camp II (there were three main camps and a couple of sub camps). That’s where you see the endless baracks, each barack planned, a sign informs you, for 53 horses, used for an avarage of 200 people. You see them stretching out on the horizon, and the watchtowers, and the wires, and the chimneys – not yet those chimneys you’re afraid of, but still – and the horror increases. Mostly groups visiting on Tuesday, no individual travellers save us, and from everywhere – Italian voices, French, English. No Germans, save us, though we hardly speak, because the sound of your own voice, talking in your language in that place where it was spoken decades ago, makes your throat feel constricted.

Then we went to Auschwitz I, the main camp. With its taunting iron gate where you find the inscription Arbeit macht frei, the letters forming a curved arch as if belonging to a Jugendstil villa in Berlin somewhere, with some frivolous quote. Auschwitz I, territory-wise speaking, is much smaller than Auschwitz-Birkenau, but then, they didn’t need as many baracks there. They killed there. You see the chimney, you go through the rooms, and though there is a sign asking for silence, a tourist guide with her group is still talking and quoting and you stare at the walls with their stains and think it can’t get worse. But it can. No matter how many photos you’ve seen, or film footage, or how many descriptions you’ve read, it gets worse. Once you get to the blocks with the exhibitions. They have the suitcases there, carefully inscribed with the names as instructed when everyone went on the trains, the tooth brushes, worst of all, the shoes and the hair. Hair from dead women, hundreds and thousands of dead women, which decades of age has mostly made into a similar colour somewhere between brown and yellow, with only a few defiant red and dark strands visible. And in another corner, you have mats and nets made from hair like this by various factorys of the German textile industry, and you keep being somewhere between the need to throw up and crying. And the shoes, there are seperate boxes for the shoes of the adults and the shoes of the children, and my mother points at a pair of small white ones which looks like the ones she kept from me, that first pair of shoes for a toddler which proud loving parents keep, and cries and cries and cries.
There are no adequate words for any of this. But it happened, it was done, and bearing witness is the last thing any of us living can do.

The Görlitz conference ended yesterday evening. Now, Görlitz is literally next to the Polish border. (You can cross a bridge and are there without having to show your ID or passport. Which in itself is an awesome sign that sometimes, there is something like progress in history.) In a week, I have another thing to attend, in Krakow. As the journey from and to either of these places is rather long if you live in Munich, and as neither the Aged Parents nor myself have ever visited Poland, we decided to use the opportunity. They had visited Dresden yesterday, picked me up in Görlitz this morning, and off we went across the border, spending most of the day in Breslau and then driving to Warsaw where we arrived late in the evening and will spend two days, until moving on to Krakow.

Breslau is one of those cities which started out as Polish (ca. 900 AD, though it did't get "official" until ca. 1000 AD), then became what could roughly called German (meaning territory wise it was ruled by the German, and later Austrian Emperors, and then more recently, i.e. mid-18th century, the Austrians duked it out with the Prussians) in the 13th century, remaining that way for six hundred years, and then it became Polish again. It was a crucial point for the trade routes, and the architecture left by the various people who lived there is simply magnificent. (Today's Breslauians, or rather Wroclawians, are very friendly, which given more recent Polish/German history always feels like simultanously a great relief and kindness to me.) And I continue to be lucky with the weather. So, behold:

( Breslau, city of splendour )

Anyone I still owe emails too or may have answered too briefly: conferences followed by travelling are my excuse - please wait a while longer?