Auschwitz-Birkenau

Today was a difficult day. No pictures of this segment for the blog although I did take pictures which I'll share later. If you start crying at a place like that you might never stop. Well there were tears, but we did manage to stop them. Stories like the ones we shared with mom today aren't normal, you mostly expect happy stories from your parents' childhoods (well mostly), so today drove home just how abnormal I am in that repect. After touring Auschwitz for a couple of hours, we drove to Auschwitz-II (Birkenau) and walked the (much larger) grounds. I noticed a man with surveying equipment working on top of the collapsed ruins of the crematory and struck up a halting conversation. His company is surveying for the museum. He was stunned when I told him my mother was a survivor of this place, and even more stunned to meet her, it reaaly put a human face on the facts for him. He told about an apothecary down the road 10 km that supplied medicines to the camp and helped escapees, a kind of 2-way door...