I've been in Krakow in Poland for a few days holiday with Bas and my Mum and Dad. It's my first time here, and we've tried to see as much as possible, although as with any city, there's only so much you can cram in over the space of a couple of days!!! The weather has been VERY changeable -- lovely and sunny one moment, then furious snow storms the next! But for the most part, although it’s been cold, it’s been good for getting around, so we’ve been able to make our way around the tourist sites without too much hassle.

We walked around the main square on our first evening here, and had a yummy Polish-type meal. On Wednesday we went to the castle and Jewish quarter, and had perogi for lunch -- one of my favourite Polish dishes! In the afternoon we went to the famous salt mines on the outskirts of Krakow -- they were outstanding!!! Beautiful and funny sculptures, all carved out of salt, along with a full-size cathedral!! I always enjoy trips below the surface of the earth, and this was one of my most impressive subterranean adventures yet.. Hugely recommended!!!! We finished the night by eating in a local shopping centre, and this time had the more globally recognised food of KFC!!

Today we went to Auschwitz -- and there ain't nothing funny to be said about that! A grim reminder of just how brutal, sickening and viciously inventive we humans can be. We visited both camps, Auschwitz, which was a concentration camp -- the prisoners were mostly worked and starved to death there -- and Berkenau, which doubled up as a death camp -- that's where the Nazis offloaded people (mostly Jews) by the train carriage load, and then gassed and cremated them. The vast body of the exhibition is in Auschwitz, but Berkenau got under my skin worst -- the sheer size of the place is staggering, and when I looked at those infamous railway tracks running into the heart of the complex, a shiver ran down my spine, and not a shiver of the delightfully scared kind, but of the "Thanks the gods I didn't end up in a hell like this" kind.

While there, listening to the stories of what the victims had to endure, faced with the very real evidence of how they'd been tortured and beaten and frozen and starved and executed and experimented on ... I found myself wondering if I would have survived. I think it's one of the reasons people are so fascinated by horrors of this kind -- it's human nature to put yourself into the position of others, to see things from their point of view, to roll play. I did that here and I honestly don't know if I would have made it through -- or, worse still, if I would have WANTED to survive. In a way, the luckiest people in these places were those who were killed quickly. Survival was a horrific, brutal, heart-rending affair. I can only begin to imagine what life must have been like for those who came through it. To have to suffer for months or even years ... to see those close to you murdered and fed to furnaces ... to live in freezing cold conditions, starving, treated worse than animals, no hope, no certainty that this would ever end ... It would have been a lot easier to let yourself be shot, or throw yourself on the electric fence, or ... I like to think I wouldn't have done that, that I'd have fought for every breath and clung to life no matter how bad things got, but I truly don't know. I don't think any of us can, not for sure. And I hope none of us are ever put to that horrendous test -- some questions in life are better off not answered.