We’re quite experienced travellers. As you’ll know if you’ve been paying attention. All those pics of me in my bikini; they’re generally not taken in Trafalgar Square. Me and Mel at the Taj Mahal, Iguasu Falls, Royal Palace in Bangkok, Sydney Opera House; they’re not in fucking Shoreditch!!! And to travel is stressful, we know that, and the airlines generally try to make it as difficult, unfriendly and hostile as possible. But I can’t really blame them for us missing our flight to Krakow Sunday morning. That was… probably… in all likelihood… on balance of probabilities… my fault. I won’t bore you with the details, it’s too painful for me, but there we were, at Heathrow, 8 o’clock in the morning, being told we can’t get on, there’s not enough time. Even though there was. BA were really helpful. Ok, they weren’t. They really weren’t. They were the diametric opposite of ‘helpful’. They were, collectively, a sneering bunch of obstructive motherfuckers only toooooo happy to say, ‘no’. There were no other flights to Krakow that day. We found an EasyJet from Gatwick in the afternoon but… no room on board for our bags. So we took a lunchtime flight to Warsaw. Then had to get a (2 hour) train down to Krakow. We made it. We had ARRIVED!!!! Ok, it was midnight, but we had ARRIVED!!!

In case there was any doubt we were in Poland, the instant awareness of the over-riding national pastime of ‘scowling’ left us in no doubt. We’d arrived in a post-Soviet Eastern bloc country where the shackles were lifted a generation ago but the cultural after-shocks last forever. No smiling. No eye contact. Better with the Gen Zs or Millennials or however you described young people here, but the middle-aged and over are grim. Maybe they think the same of ‘us Westerners’. Grim but smiling like idiots.

Yesterday we went to Auschwitz. Its horrible. I don’t think I actually learned a lot about it that I didn’t already know, having taken what probably amounts to the collective degree level of studies taken over a lifetime, but it gives it a real place. And a real size. Because it’s fucking massive. 40 square kilometres dedicated to the murder of people the Nazis didn’t like. Yes, Jews, but lots of others too. Gypsies, gays, ‘political enemies’, Russians. But mainly the Jews. In 1935, 10% of Poland was Jewish. Now it’s virtually nothing. Same for most other European countries occupied during the Nazi reign across Europe.

And when you get to Birkenau, or Auschwitz 2, as they call it, the sheer scale of the German death machine just hits you. It’s a massive place which, in its ‘heyday’ could slaughter up to 10,000 people a day. It was industrialised murder on a scale never before or since even imagined. The marriage of ruthless German efficiency to the insane ideology of Hitler and his acolytes. And you would really have to admire the efficiency if it related to anything else other than the wholesale slaughter of human beings. Who first have to be ‘de-humanised’ in the eyes of the guards, the soldiers, the camp workers and everyone else. Otherwise the machine would break down if there was any kind of conscience in play.

It is, quite frankly, fucking horrible. The absolute worst place the world has ever known. It didn’t have me breaking down in tears, nor any other form of emotional outpouring. It just made me feel sick that people could be made to willingly participate in such an activity over such a prolonged period of time.

Otherwise, we’re having a fab time in Poland (?)

Happy Tuesday

A xxxx