Poland – Black and White

I recently went to Poland on a photography trip and stayed in the lovely city of Krakow.  During the five days we visited the infamous Salt Mines which boasts the deepest Cathedral underground, you can even get married there!  The Nazi’s used the mine during the occupation of Poland to work on engines for their planes.  However the Polish resistance fighters were some of the most brave, as they frequently dropped a spanner in the works..literally..whilst working on the engines and did an intentionally bad job at repairs hoping for them to break down, putting their lives at risk.  We visited Oskar Schindlers Factory where there is now an amazing museum documenting Poland from 1939 – 1944.  It is well worth a visit and so well designed and curated.  The day before we left we went to Auschwitz and Birkenau concentration camps.  Nothing can prepare you for the sheer enormity and the scale of death, torture and hell European Jews, gypsies and other groups the Nazis considered expendable and not part of the master plan.  I will not be posting any images from either of these camps on my blog, but if you have the chance to go prepare yourself for the scale of tourism as well as the horror.  If you are in a group with a guide you won’t have a great deal of time to contemplate your surroundings as you are pretty much kept moving most of the time.  We had a little more time in Birkenau, which is the bigger of the two camps, and where the vast majority were murdered.  I got the chance to just walk around on my own and take in the scale of what had happened there.  I don’t think I will ever be the same again.