Today we had a lighter experience, we visited the Jewish center in Oswiecim. This place not only looks at the horrible things that happened to the Jews during the Holocaust, but also at their happiness before and after the war.
We got to play detectives as we handled different photos of something in the center. It could be a photo of a person, a stone tablet, or even a letter to someone, and we had to figure out the story behind it. Before this trip I would have made up the craziest story, nowhere close to the truth, but surprisingly we all were very close to the truth.
After our fun workshop, we took a tour of the town. It is very small, but has a long history of a Jewish community. It was hard to imagine what the town would have looked like back before the war. What used to have over 8,000 Jews, has none to this day. The town is completely different.
After leaving Oswiecim, we had a free day in Kraków. We all split up and roamed the streets. I went straight for the town market again because I wasn’t finished shopping! The shop is a long tunnel-like market with almost every vender selling the beautiful amber Kraków is known for.
I then traveled the streets and admired the architecture. While in Berlin, it is very industrial and looks like a city in the U.S. But Kraków has held on to most of their original buildings from the 1400s. Walking down the streets, you feel like you have stepped back in time. As you gaze upon the gothic and renaissance buildings, they look gorgeous.
