How to score your own compartment

Once again we were too stingy to splurge, this time on a sleeper cabin on an overnight train from Krakow to Prague. We opted for seats instead, and I wasn’t very pleased to find that the train consisted of corridor coaches rather than open coaches. How awkward is it to be stuck in a compartment for 8 hours with another stranger (or if you’re really unlucky, 7 other strangers) when all you want to do is take your boots off, put your feet up, kick back and lie down, anything to make yourself more comfortable on the narrow pleather seats of the compartment?

Also, if the dementors from Harry Potter and the sleazy Italian man from Eurotrip have taught me anything, it is that you do not want to be stuck with anyone you don’t know when you’re in a train compartment. Ever.

For the benefit of any future victims of this train configuration, here’s a little guide on how to score your own compartment in a corridor coach. You will need 1x train ticket, and the unabashed will to deceive:

How to score your own compartment:

1. Grab an empty compartment and settle down. Check that no one is around. Cover the seat with your belongings. Tip: be messy.
2. “Fall sound asleep”. Except not really.
3. Keep checking. It helps that you sprawl over your seat.
4. “Drift off” whenever you hear footsteps. It helps to look exhausted so the other passengers choose other compartments over yours.
5. Continue checking. Look fierce, just in case. I wouldn’t want to share the same compartment as someone who looks fierce.
6. Snap awake and flash the victory sign when the train starts to move. You now have your own compartment and a guilty conscience (if you, unlike me, have any semblance of a conscience)

Making sure no one came into our compartment wasn’t easy, but I’m glad we managed to pull it off, it took the discomfort factor of the train ride down from an 8/10 to a 5/10. One demerit point each for the uncomfortable seats, the unplanned hour-long stop near the Czech border, the heaters shutting down during aforementioned stop, the resultant delay, and the toilets. Argh.

I complain a lot don’t I…

Schindler’s Factory

On our last day in Krakow we visited that used to be Schindler’s factory, which is today a modern museum dedicated not just to Oskar Schindler but also Krakow’s war effort in WW2. Certainly did not expect the latter, but I’m not complaining, the exhibits were engaging and I wasn’t struck with that annoying Information Overload headache that comes with your run-of-the-mill museum.

In a stunning display of athleticism after we left, I agreed to walk back to the Old Town Square – no regrets, while crossing the Most Kotlarski bridge we saw a pretty sunset, interesting grafitti, and after crossing we promptly trotted to Galeria Kazimierz for some KFC. Got to love food detours, it almost makes long arduous treks worth it.

Wieliczka Salt Mine

The Wieliczka Salt Mine: over 7 centuries old, over 700 steps down underground, countless chapels, sculptures and chandeliers carved out of salt. Included in the ticket price: a 3-hour long guided tour and an open invitation to lick everything in sight. Not that I tried.

Karczma Halit, Wieliczka

(I told you we had Pierogi a little too often in while in Krakow)

After Auschwitz we drove 70km east to Wieliczka, where we were dropped off at the Polish restaurant Karczma Halit for lunch. Pity I had to scoff down my duck in apple sauce (#6) in 5 minutes because we were running tight on time, good food shouldn’t be treated with such disrespect. Sad face. Easily the best meal we had while in Poland.

Auschwitz and Birkenau

Laurence Rees, 2005:

[Auschwitz] was a collective enterprise owned by thousands of people, who made the decision themselves not just to take part but to contribute initiatives in order to solve the problem of how to kill human beings and dispose of their bodies on a scale never attempted before.

During its short functional lifetime, Auschwitz evolved from a concentration camp (explaining Arbeit Macht Frei) to an agricultural research facility (yes) and finally to the death camp that we know of today, one that industrialised the killing of its prisoners with appalling efficiency.

1.1 million people are thought to have died in Auschwitz I and Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We were dropped off at Auschwitz I first. I was freezing even though I was fully bundled up; I cannot imagine how the prisoners survived daily roll calls, which would last for hours, stark naked in the biting cold.

As many as 3-5 prisoners were squeezed into each individual bunker, and many failed to survive the nights there.

A hallway lined with the mug shots of prisoners that perished at Auschwitz, complete with their dates of entry and death. It put some faces to the statistics that we’ve heard about Auschwitz and the Holocaust; the experience affected me on a more personal level thereafter.

One of these hallways was dedicated to the female prisoners of Auschwitz – it broke me that most of them did not survive past a week in that camp.

I wasn’t very sure if this electric barbed wire was for prisoners then or visitors today, but I’ll assume that it’s the former.

The guard post (on the left) afforded the guard on duty a vantage point from which to shoot at escaping prisoners (or very much anyone he pleased).

Train carriage used to transport prisoners from all over Europe to Birkenau on the right.

The remains of one of the crematoriums at Birkenau, destroyed by the Nazis in a haste at the end of WW2, right before the Red Army arrived and liberated Auschwitz.

I think that it’s important to recognise that Auschwitz was neither the brain child nor directly run by Hitler. The fact that 1.1 million people were so effectively killed in this place was not just thanks to the Nazi leadership, but also thousands of people who, before the war, were average people like you and me. Some of them truly believed in Hitler’s vision of a superior race, but more often that not, the perpetrators were SS sergeants who found such murder unnecessary and even abhorrent; some were even prisoners who functioned as cogs in the wheel of Death in order to survive another day. That such an obscene number of people were killed in the short span of half a decade was the collective effort of thousands of people who in the face of death had their values warped and their fundamental characters altered. I think that that’s what’s truly horrific about Auschwitz.

If you’d like to learn more about Auschwitz – its evolution, the intricacies of the system, how the gas chambers came to be, the mindset of the perpetrators from Hitler to the SS to the Kapos in the camp – do pick up ‘Auschwitz: The Nazis and ‘The Final Solution’ by Laurence Rees, it is an excellent book, insightful, written in memory of those murdered at Auschwitz.