By Caitlin Peabody
Sunday was a very, very long day with a lot of walking, but I enjoyed every bit of it. We started on a tour of Kazimierz, named after one of the great Polish kings, which used to be a completely separate town in medieval Poland. After Kazimierz we made our way to the Jewish District and visited one of the oldest synagogues in Poland.
The cemetery there had been completely destroyed by the Nazi’s during WWII and smashed all of the gravestones. In order to try and preserve those gravestones and respect those who had died, they rebuilt part of the cemetery wall and included the gravestones as part of the structure. This was remarkably beautiful and a really neat touch to this place.
After lunch, we spent the rest of the afternoon walking through the Krakow Ghetto, the concentration camp Plaszow, and ending at the Schindler Factory museum. The Plaszow concentration camp is completely empty, with just a few remnants left of old buildings. The Nazis blew up the entire camp to try to cover up their crimes. When we were at the Schindler Factory museum there was a very good depiction of what Plaszow actually looked like which helped us all visualize what the empty land was. This day gave me a better understanding of the layout of the city at the time of the war and it was also a very good introduction to our visit to Auschwitz the following day.
