I had a lovely week's holiday to Krakow with my friend Rita. It was warm and sunny so we enjoyed sitting in the large square, Rynek Glowny, where there are so many lovely restaurants with outside seating arrangements.
We found that the Polish people were very friendly and most of them spoke very good English.
I had recently read a book called ‘The man that broke into Auschwitz’. This is a true story about Denis Avey, co-written with Rob Broomby so one of the trips I felt I would like to go on was to the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.
It is about an hours’ drive from Krakow. We were then introduced to our English speaking tour guide. We were given audio equipment and headphones to enable us to hear what she was saying. I decided to try using this and although I could hear her voice I could not make out what she was saying. I tried the T-loop on my hearing aids hoping that the clarity of speech would be a bit better but unfortunately it didn’t help. I did manage to speak to the guide and I asked her what facilities they had for deaf or hard of hearing. She said that she did not think there was anything available and had never heard of a loop system.
I think that if a person has moderate hearing loss then I am sure with the audio equipment they would have been able to hear what she was saying. It is times like that that I can get frustrated and sad at being deaf, I really would have liked have been able to hear all the facts and the things that she was describing. Rita did tell me a few times what she had been talking about as we moved around.
We were shown the gas chamber, crematorium and display cases of human hair, suitcases, (some with names on them and where they were from), children’s shoes, artificial limbs and many personal effects.
In some of the corridors there were photographs of prisoners in their striped uniforms, their faces haunted with heads shaved. On the photographs it showed their date of arrival and date of death.
There were lots of information boards/visuals which enabled me to keep up with the horrific things that happened in Auschwitz and the scale of torture that these poor people were subjected to. 1,100,000 Jews died there along with hundreds of thousands of other nationalities.
The three and a half hour tour was very well presented and although very emotional and distressing I was really pleased that we went.