Well, today (or yesterday, technically) is/was the day I took a day trip to Poland. I've been awake about 24 hours straight now, so no matter what I think, my typing will be horrible and my prose rather boring. Oh well. Such a day would depress anyone, in a way.

Anyway, this day trip involved 'awaking' at 3.30am. However, I didn't manage to sleep. So after lying in bed for 3 hours, had to get up, dress (I _finally_ got that lovely 3/4 coat!) and wander out to the bus stop at about 4.10am to wait for the minibus. It's surprising the amount of traffic one gets in a small town at 4am, even if it is only a car every minute or so. Besides, I got on the minbus when it turned up ten minute late and was forced to endure the Chiltern FM DJ hearing and granting multiple requests for the singing paedophile's songs. Needless to say, I was very glad when I reached the airport.

After the very unfortunate problem of Alicia not having brought her passport (Poor Alicia... it wasn't even her fault, the office was meant to have it) and having to go home, we did manage to hang around and wondered why the signs in 'London' Luton airport were all in Italian rather than English. My favourite Italian sign being 'Piu! Baggligano!', of course. The plane, unfortunately painted a mildewey light blue, was tacky, but it got off the ground at about 7am GMT.

The flight, surprisingly, was absolutely beautiful. What many people don't get is whilst it is grey and rainy down here, once you get above the cloud, the day is perfect. The sun rose above the white sheet of cloud and the skies' blue filled the window. Of course, like all flights, it was also irritating. 'Breakfast' consisted of a frozen bit of low-quality bread and some 'vegetarian sausages' that had clearly been lying around in the aircraft's galley for a number of years. One could also see, in the cloudless moments, the cities of Rotterdam and Leipzig.

But the flight was over soon enough, and we landed in Krakow, our mildew-blue airliner rolling past the propeller-driven, bright green prides of the Polish military machine in all their single-bored-guard splendour. Upon leaving the airport, one notices immediately three things.
A) Across the road, the 'Communist' architecture of the huge concrete rectangle with the little square windows and the sad, dim yellow lighting.
B) The giant revolving Coca-Cola logo, perhaps 6m in diameter, which has blatantly re-used the same revolving platform which was once used for a giant poster of Stalin or somesuch Soviet ridiculousness.
C) The Polish advertising and Polish place names for foriegn places, destinations including Londyn and Paryz.

Our three 'Kraktours' coaches were outfitted in classic 1970s 'Bright orange plastic fake leather and bright blue carpet' livery. An eyesore, to be sure, but all anyone looked at was the row upon row of identical, forlorn houses and flats with dull washing hung out to dry in the mist. And then, after the repetitive journey, we arrived. The guide makes a casual comment about how efficient the extermination process was. Then it struck me, for the first time.

ARBEIT MACHT FREI.

There it stood. The wrought-iron gate of Auschwitz I that caused so much misery. Inside the buildings. Rooms full of people's spectacles. Shoes, seperated into men's, women's, and children's. Human hair. Clothes. Artificial limbs and wheelchairs. A hall full of combs, a hall full of suitcases, a hall full of pots and pans. A baby's china doll. The next building. The extermination process. Cram two thousand into a gas chamber and watch them die in agony through little windows for twenty minutes. Shave the corpses, take out their gold teeth, burn them. Use the ashes for fertiliser.

Room after room of horror. The execution courtyard. A building where Nazi doctors carried out their obscene experiments, and further up in the same building the room where certain Nazis would bring captured women to rape. The standing-cells where people died of thirst, hunger, and exhaustion, standing five people in a tiny unventilated, inaccessible room the size of a telephone box. The room where the 'Zyclon B' gas was first tested on humans. The cell a Polish pilot was kept in, his fingernail-carvings of Eagles and Jesus Christ still on the brick walls.

The small gas chamber, the scuff and torment of the people trying to get out still evident in the cold concrete. Images of the pyramid of death that would form around the door, desperate people trying to escape a slow, evil death. One cannot breathe there easily, even now, but not for the gas but for the horror and obscenity of it all.

We leave, quickly, retreating to the relative safety of the orange plastic fake leather of Polish coaches. But it's not over yet. After all, it's only three o'clock.

Auschwitz II. Birkenau. The famous railway lines which today seem to have no end, but then had a most definite and cruelly malign one. Wooden shacks, originally stables for 54 horses, as far as the eye can see, at least in ruined form. The Nazis kept 1000 people in each of these 'barracks'. On the official map, they are marked as 'Habitable buildings'. This is a supreme irony. Climb the camp supervisor's tower directly above that dread railway line. Look out over the domain of the death factory.

Gas chambers and crematoriums, destroyed by the Nazis in a useless attempt to hide their atrocities. The ruins stand. A once-underground room about a hundred metres long and ten wide. Two thousand innocents would have stood there each day. Two thousand innocents would have died as insect poison filled their lungs and left them choking to death for twenty long minutes. Two thousand innocents, women, children, babies. Two thousand innocents, who thought they were going to have a shower. There's four of these here, plus one at Auschwitz I. Ten thousand a day, murdered in one of the cruellest ways imaginable. And then they were burned and used as fertiliser or bed-stuffing or psychopathic doctor's toys or the playthings of twisted men's desires.

Abomination. All of it, abomination against what anyone would consider civilisation, humanity, sanity. All the time we have heard the chants of the five hundred Israelis who have come here, draped in flags, waving banners. Our group is but one hundred and fifty - one-third students, 'my group', the other two-thirds London's Jewish community. We say prayers, make speeches, lay candles. It's windy and cold here, and very dark. The candles go out quickly.

I remain behind as the others walk off back to the railway tracks. Until now, I have not truly had the sheer... no word describes this in our language or any other. But I have seen the steps into the gas chamber, the collapsed doorway leading to the now-dark hole that was once shinily clean 'showers' that filled with twenty hundred corpses a day. The enormity and what _happened_ sink in. I shed a tear, let it drop, and walk back towards the tracks that lead out of the giant, despicable gates to this evil place. One by one, along the planks under the metal tracks. The watchtower at the end never seems to get closer. I do not know how long I walked, the bitter, deathly cold biting at me in the impenetrable darkness broken only by the occasional incense lamp or distant prayer. But I did, and retreated to the trappings of the height of 1970s decor once more.

I cannot breathe easily. I am hungry, but cannot eat. I rationally force myself to eat what was inended to be lunch five hours ago. After all, I had not had a single bite for 24 hours, and the five hours of standing in bitter cold admist death has no good consequences for health, either. We silently allow the vehicle to take us to one of the last remaining synagogues in Krakow. The switch from twisted, evil metal and unrepentant concrete to bright gold, fine wood, black marble, and tapestries is a welcome relief. Across the road is a Jewish life museum. We spend perhaps ten minutes there, examining the beautiful and/or atmospheric photographs. Poignant images of the place we just visted covered in snow adorn the rear wall. We leave this strange island of classical music and the English, middle-class curator with his coffee bar and drive off.

Schindler's factory has to be missed. We're late for the flight home and it's been pitch-black for three hours now, so nothing could be seen anyway. We bail from the coaches, force a guilty laugh at the Polish 'Hamburga' advertisement featuring a winking, ugly stewardess, and board our chartered aeroplane once again. This time, we fly by night, and the lights of cities dance beneath our wings. The sparkling circular lights of Berlin, Bremen, Amsterdam, and every small town in Germany wink at us from below, staring up through the lack of cloud that does not last across the Channel.

Cloud across home is thick, as usual. We see no land until we land, so to speak. Then, of course, we wait half an hour in the stifling, inactive plane because the airport transport bus has broken down. Disembark, spend another half an hour wading through the crowds of other people at passport control, and step free, only to find a most curious thing awaiting you in the bus.

The bus driver you have been stuck with, you see, is overweight, unshaven, irreverent, and clearly drunk. Not only that, but he has been smoking cannabis a few minutes ago, and smokes a cigarette now. But it's too late to get off now. He's hissed the doors shut with a resounding clang as they finish and set off into the maze, our destination the car park. The following is a rough transcript of the conversation that took place between this driver and I. (Note that the bus' electronic signal reads 'DESTINATION: Long Stay Car Park')

DRIVER, loudly: "This bus don't go to the station, it goes to the long stay car park!"
ME: "We want the long stay car park."
DRIVER: "This bus doesn't go to the long stay car park. I think." *He sits down and begins to drive the bus lurchingly forward, only remembering to close the doors as he swerves around the nearby roundabout and his bottle of Dr. Pepper falls off the dashboard and out of the bus*
DRIVER: "Have a good holiday?"
ME: "We haven't been on holiday."
DRIVER: "Where you bin (sic), then?"
ME: "We just returned from Poland."
DRIVER: "Pooland(sic)? Why'd you wanna go there?"
ME: "We were visiting the sites of the Holocaust for the day."
DRIVER: "Holocaust? What the fuck's that, mate?"
ME: "The extermination of the Jews and others by the Nazis in WWII."
DRIVER: "Fucking hell, why go for that?"
ME: "To remember those who died."
DRIVER: "How many?"
ME: "At least six million."
DRIVER: "Fucking hell. I never knew the Nazis were bad blokes."
ME (desperately trying to avoid the conversation and hold on for dear life, considering how driver is now driving standing up, trying to hold conversation, work out what the Holocaust is, operating the bus radio, and attempting to scratch his buttocks on the glass panel that divides his seat with that of a young woman not in our party): "In fact, I shouldn't talk to you. The sign says not to."
DRIVER: "Don't you give a fuck about that, mate." *He swerves around a roundabout, into an enormous puddle, and seems to damage the bus on a speed bump which knocks a chap in the back of the bus off his feet. After several more worrying minutes, he drives this bus into a car rental area.*
DRIVER: "Car park."
ME: "It doesn't look like it is."
DRIVER: "It is. All of you get off." *People begin to get off, warily*
ME: "The sign says 'Car Rental'"
DRIVER: "Yeah, only pulling your legs. GET ON, YOU COCKS!" *the people leap on again startledly and the bus moves again, twice under the same bridge in the wrong direction before arriving at the long stay car park*
ME: "...Thanks...Bye!"

We hurried off quickly after that, and even had to dodge his madcap driving as he roared the bus straight at us along the narrow car park 'roads'. Still, we escaped, got the minibuses, and I was dropped off about 500m from my home across the Common. I wandered back and collapsed onto the sofa, savouring a tiny bar of Dairy Milk before crawling up here to write. And here I am, however long it has been since then... a mad, depressing, and abominable day, yet important and moving. And I get the day off school tomorrow, as well, I believe.

-Luke