flashback friday

i have officially left my twenties. yep, thats right folks, i am now 30 years old. and it feels old! anyway, having been given the idea by the lovely tennille, i decided to do a flashback today, because i have a good flashback for this day. this is my journal entry from 12 years ago today:

today i turned 18! i had a hard time remembering. yesterday we left prague, and travelled all the way to oswiecim in poland. i hardly feel being in the coach six hours now. after being in it 24 hours, it feels like a second home. last night we had a really good meal in the hotel, then we went for a walk to the main entrance of auschwitz. i couldn't picture it at all as it was dark and there is a road next to it now. then there was a gap in the traffic and i could hear a train in the distance. that was really spooky. in the hotel the bbc filmed us discussing what we were expecting today.

this morning i was first out of bed in our room. all eight girls were sharing for the first time. it was so cold, i put on extra clothes in the night and was still freezing. someone muttered happy birthday and i was like 'oh yeah'. i kept forgetting. it didn't seem very important compared to what we were doing. whe i did remember, i kept thinking about all the people who had their birthday in auschwitz for real.

when we got to auschwitz it wasn't at all what i expected. we had a guide and she took us around the buildings. the first building had all the living conditions still how they were. i didn't cry in that building even though it was almost beyond belief how they lived. the next building we went in had one huge room on one side that held two tons of human hair. it was all the same colour - cyclon B gas kills the pigment. all the hair was cut off after the people died. this got me the most. all the other things we saw - rooms of shoes, bowls, etc i could see being removed without the person dying. the hair hit home more. the other thing that got me was the baby clothes. the monsters that did this were inhuman. they cannot have had feelings. after that i did not cry. the rest was just too bad to comprehend. we saw block 11, where the first killings with cyclon B took place, and the punishment cells in the basement. we saw the wall of death where people were shot. we saw the crematorium and the gas chambers. you just cannot take in that where you are standing thousands of people died. after we had been round auschwitz, we got back on the coach and went two kilometers up the road to Birkenau. this is auschwitz II. it is one of the most isolated places i have ever been, which is why the nazis chose it for an extermination camp along with its rail connections. auschwitz itself was brick buildings, laid out properly, as it was a polish army barracks before ww2. auschwitz -birkenau was purpose built, and its huge. a lot of it is no longer there, as it was all wooden, but all the chimneys are there - they are brick. what you picture as auschwitz - the tower with the rail tracks through the bottom -is actually at birkenau. from the top of the tower the chimneys stretch almost as far as you can see. only a few of the buildings nearest the tower are still standing. these are exactly as they were. it was as if the SS had just left the day before.

sorry its kinda long.. after this we tried to travel to wroclaw, but our coach broke down in rural poland. it was an interesting day, one that i won't ever forget. and when i feel down, its something i try to think to put into perspective my tiny problems.

happy birthday me. xxx