History comes to Life for Hazelwood College Students
Transition Year student Helena O Shea reports on their recent trip to Poland
Imagine being asked to attend school at midnight! Well that’s exactly what twenty seven sleep-deprived students along with three teachers did in order to depart for our trip to Poland. After a five hour journey by bus and plane we eventually reached Krakow airport on Wednesday March 19th at 11am. We even managed to fit in some exercise on the long walk to the departure gate. Needless to say, once we arrived we were a little tired but it was absolutely worth it.
We were welcomed by our tour guide who accompanied us to our hotel and tried, in vain, to teach us a few Polish phrases. Once we were settled we set off on a walking tour of the city. We visited Churches, Palaces, the University and a Market. At each stop we were given a brief history of the building or place, the people who lived there and its importance to Polish history. After such a busy day we were glad to retreat to our hotel and out of the cold.
The following morning at 6am we woke up to a snow covered city. After breakfast we set off on the hour and a half bus trip Auschwitz. First we went to Auschwitz 1. The camp is now a museum where we saw how prisoners in both that camp and Auschwitz2-Birkenau lived and died. Our guide took us through the barracks of the camp and explained what life would have been like there at the different stages of the camps history.
After lunch we had a tour of Auschwitz 2- Birkenau. We began the tour at the reconstructed wooden huts where the prisoners lived. We had read the novel “The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas†in school before we left so we found this tour very interesting. As we continued our tour the snow began to fall again and after just ten minutes everything was snow white.
On the third morning we went to the salt mines near Krakow. Despite the very cold temperatures we had been prepared for underground, we didn’t feel the cold that much; by the end of the tour we had walked up and down over seven hundred steps of stairs. As we walked through the mine we were told stories relating to monuments erected in memory of various famous Poles. One of the highlights of the tour was the beautiful Church at the bottom of the mine. It had been carved from salt by three miners and had taken over sixty years. We also visited a museum where we saw exhibitions of art made from salt and old pieces of equipment used for mining.
That afternoon we were given the chance to spend any money that we might have had left in one of the biggest shopping centres in the city. After dinner that night we braved to cold to go bowling. As soon as we returned to our hotel, the packing frenzy began and the panic about how much heavier our bags were now that we had done our shopping.
At 1pm the next day we landed at Shannon Airport, disappointed that it was over but glad to be home. Everybody really enjoyed themselves and the whole trip was a wonderful experience.
