My first stop in Europe after Warsaw was Kraków. Krakow, the former capital of Poland, is really a city like a capital. After purchasing our tickets from Polskibus with a promotion, we arrived in Kraków in the evening after a 6-hour journey. The name of the hostel I stayed in was Dizzy Daisy Downtown Hostel. When we got off the bus, it was a short walking distance to the hostel. On the way, we bought a city map from a tourist information office and asked for the hostel’s address, and the officer marked it on the map and gave it to us. I’ve never stayed in a mixed room for 12 people before. Normally, I sleep without paying much attention to factors such as sound and light, but that night… I couldn’t sleep. The man seemed to be suffocating in his sleep with his snoring… No matter how much noise I made, he did not wake up. Knowing that I would wake up early in the morning and explore new places excited me and forced me to sleep. When I woke up it was 9:00. After having my breakfast, I devoted the first half of the day to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps. I arrived at the first camp after a rainy journey that lasted about 1 hour. The gloom and rain of that day’s weather, the sadness of the massacres that took place there, and the hopelessness of young children, women and the elderly touched my heart. On its door is the German saying “Arbeit macht frei”, meaning work sets you free… Rows of blocks, gloomy weather, depicted massacres, wall of death… Auschwitz I camp, established in 1940, is located near Oswiecim. The camp where thousands of people were burned and gassed to death… There is sadness in this camp for the people who entered the gas chambers with Cyclon-B gas, and for the “little children who died before they could grow up” who died painfully in the crematoriums. Among these blocks, Josef Mengele, whose nickname was “The Angel of Death”, carried out unscientific research on babies and twins in Block 10, and forced sterilization, castration and hypothermia experiments were carried out on adults. I walked for 2 hours in the places where people lived and were tortured, killed and tortured with such murderous and systematic brutality… Here, there are photographs showing that people were murdered with Cyclon-B gas and that deadly experiments were tried on humans, and photographs of the crematorium where people were burned. When we enter the blocks, I breathe in the even more creepy and sad atmosphere. The hair of poor people who had Cyclon-B gas in their hair and the woven products made from that hair. How can people do these things to people, how can they feel like killing the dreams of tiny, innocent children… Seeing closely the realities of the dormitories where Giosuè and his father spent their nights, which I watched in the movie Life is Beautiful (La vita è bella), revealed again the cruelty of what happened. Then, I went to the other camp free of charge via the shuttle bus operating between the two camps. A traveler I met here, while talking about not experiencing these pains again and wanting to see the realities closely, said that his next route from here was to go to the place where the Normandy Landing took place. Here are a few images from the Auschwitz II camp… There is a room in Auschwitz that impressed me the most. I think he achieved his goal. In a pure white room, there are walls containing children’s dreams and drawings. In this room with beautiful acoustics, the voices of hopeful, undergrown children ring your ears as if there were children walking around you… No matter what status, ideology, color or race you are, Auschwitz is a museum that must be visited and is important to visit in order to build a bridge with our future. I couldn’t talk much about Krakow in this article, Auschwitz predominated a bit, in the next article I will talk about Wawel Castle, Old Town, Rynek Główny and many other places in Krakow. Mavimore Turizm is a travel agency registered with TÜRSAB. Document number: A-8307