Travel Photography, Writing and Photoblog from Matt Feldman

It was a good introduction. I arrived in Poznan, Poland, by train from Berlin and after a day of travel originating at 3 am in Istanbul, Turkey, I needed food. Polish "milk bars" define no-frills eating, as if your high school cafeteria was redesigned without all that fancy decor. State-subsidized, they were intended cater to the less affluent, but may now be filled with a clientele of families, students and businesspeople. And they're a backpacker's dream come true.

When I walked in, I saw the chlodnik zupa (beetroot soup). Glowing bright pinkish-red against a stark white bowl, it almost looked fake. The soup was dotted with pieces of z jajkiem (hard-boiled egg) and dill. Bowls were on every table and conversations were halted as the neon-coloured liquid was practically inhaled. I couldn't immediately recognize it or pronounce it from the menu on the wall, but I wanted it. And everything else people were eating. Pointing to a full table near the cash register, my ordering was brief: "Hello. That, please." She knew exactly what I meant.

A kotlet schabowy (breaded pork cutlet) the size of my head. A nest of cabbage salatki (salad) with a bright vinegrette dressing. An entire field worth of ziemniaki (mashed potatoes) with a mushroom cream sauce and a side of ogorek kizony (dill cucumber). Rounded out with two scoops of lemon and strawberry lody (ice cream). The bill? About $3.75 US. Only a few hours in the country and I was in love.

This morning, after a walking tour of Poznan's central square, I head to another milk bar near what appear to be government buildings. The bar is busy, but with university-aged people, dressed for classes. Leaning toward the counter to see what's being served, I feel a tug on my backpack. Ready to throw punches in defense of my camera gear, I wheel around to find a familiar face. While walking from the train station to the hostel the night before, I had asked directions of a young guy in a car as he was turning into his driveway. "Did you find your hotel okay last night?" he asks.

Martin introduces himself and invites me over to his table. We pig out for what amounts to about $3. Offering to show me around Poznan, we head out in his tiny Mercedes (a model similar to the Smart Car, but not sold in North America) for a quick tour of places I never would otherwise visit. Our first stop is an upscale shopping mall. The building is more than a hundred years old, but its renovations are striking, giving it a bold art-deco style with exposed girders and rich red brick. Its contents are perfectly contemporary, with H&M, Benetton and other high-end retailers. We eat ice cream across from a sports bar showing an NBA basketball game. The tour continues, driving around the city's monuments and prominent vistas. It's a great tour, but Martin, with English skills far better than most people I know in Indiana, still constantly apologizes for flaws in his vocabulary. Where did you learn your English, I inquire. "Where all young people in Poland learn it: The Cartoon Network."

The massive, grey odes to Communist architecture are everywhere. The central train station, dark, depressing and dirty, is gargantuan, like its own underground Gotham City. It's a labrynth of snack shops, clothing stores, internet cafes. While the blocky buildings give Warsaw a distinct historical style, modernity is moving quickly to catch up. Movie theaters are filled with American films, music stores blast American R&B hits and kids wearing Addidas uniforms ride skateboards in parks.

My hostel is a drab, unpleasant building in a clonal apartment block outside the main section of Warsaw, linked to the colossal train station by tram lines. I wander parks and a few museums and what was once the famous Jewish Ghetto, now rebuilt to its original opulence after the total destruction of WWII. The gorgeous square is lined by colourful buildings and luscious-smelling restaurants.

But in the Marriott Hotel I am met by Chris and Priscilla who are spending two weeks wandering around Poland and the Czech Republic. We were last overseas together in Paris for New Year's 2002, so we immediately begin making up for lost time and head for a bar.

We wander the sunny streets of Warsaw and pass the statue of Nicolas Copernicus, who by his research in the mid 1500's became the founder of modern astronomy. And also somewhat of a heretic. Through his careful and refined work, Copernicus was able to concretely refute the ego-centric astronomy of Aristotle and Ptolemy. With the publication of his "Little Commentary," Copernicus became the first to assert that the Earth, and man living upon it, was not the center of the universe — it is we who are moving around the sun.

There are no smiles here. There are no families with strollers and balloons and ice cream for the kids. There is nobody selling ornamental models of monuments. No souvenir key chains or fold-out postcard sets or coffee mugs or t-shirts. There are no smiles here.

There is horror. There is anguish. There is silence. And death.

Here, about 60 km West of Krakow is the town of Oswiecim (pronounced Osh-ven-sheem) and the largest cemetery in Europe. The rest of the world knows Oswiecim as Auschwitz. From 27 countries around Europe, about 1.5 million people were murdered here. The setting makes it even more difficult to grapple with the magnitude of the tragedy. Quaint farmhouses and fields and forests roll on to the horizon. Stacks of golden wheat. Seas of green cabbage. On a warm, beautifully cloudless summer day in southern Poland, it is bitter irony that a place so peaceful and with such tranquil beauty could have experienced such impossible horror.

Originally established in Oswiecim as Polish pre-war army barracks, the largest Nazi concentration camp was converted in 1940 for the Final Solution to the Jewish Problem. The displays, terrible and touching, in buildings used to house over 2000 prisoners (designed to hold 700), document the insanity. Maps detail the scope of victims' final journeys: from Oslo, Norway, to Rhodes, Greece, they were brought from across the continent, some on journeys over 2000 km. To be murdered.

Efforts to improve efficiency weren't limited to killings. At Auschwitz, nothing was wasted. Plundered from the victims, darkened rooms display what was taken. Cases full of eyeglasses. Mountains of shoes. Piles of dishes, baby clothes, shoe polish and brushes: all to be used by SS officers and their families. Tons of hair, now gray and light brown, originally intended to be woven back into blankets and uniforms in the wartime textile industry.

A room full of suitcases, labeled with the names and dates of birth of their owners. Each person was allowed 25 kg of luggage for their "relocation." Documents show how many victims were even sold the very train tickets which would deliver them to their end. Pots and pans, segregated by colour, for preparation of Kosher food. Hair and shaving brushes. Razors. Behind the double rows of tall barbed wire fences, charged with 6000 V of electricity, it's all here, in the brown buildings behind the gate. The gate with the prisoner-forged sign arching above, proclaiming "Arbeit Macht Frei" — work makes you free. The guide points out the upside-down "b" — one of the few indications of heartening, if brief, resistance.

Tours wind solemnly through the displays of prison life and death. The average person selected for labour, and not killed immediately upon arrival, lived three to six months. Some lived a week. The horrific medical experiments. The gratuitous torture. The random executions for offenses so severe as crying. It is a draining six hours. It is a wonder how guides present their myriad stories and anecdotes and statistics day after day after day, recounting grim tales and hearing even more stories from visiting survivors and their families. One recent family, our guide recalls, asked to stop while walking down a hallway lined with prisoner photos. In the early days of the camp's existence, Nazi photographers documented the prisoners with photos and numbered signs like police document criminals with mugshots. The meticulous documentation ended when the sheer volume of prisoners made the record keeping too timely and expensive. In this hallway lined with photographs, the family stopped our guide because amidst hundreds of pictures, they'd recognized their brother.

But for all the evil of Auschwitz, it is Birkenau (officially known as "KL Auschwitz II") where things became "efficient." A camp of almost 400 acres (10 times the size of Auschwitz I), ruined barracks and towers and fences and train tracks and ovens stretch out on a mind-boggling scale. All in the lush Polish countryside — yet another site of extraordinary beauty visited by the extraordinary horror of war.

A sign on one of the barrack walls notes that those who fail to remember history are bound to live through it again. And some 60 years after the liberation of these terrible places, it is not clear that lessons have truly been learned. Rwanda and Bosnia in the 1990's. The horror unfolding in Darfour, Sudan, this very summer. While these conflicts do not have equivalent numbers, are the deaths of one million Sudanese people less important than six million Jews? And while Rwanda and Bosnia were eventually and belatedly halted, Darfour rages on, waiting and begging for the world to arrive — tragically late, yet again.

As I walk back from the far corner of the Birkenau camp, where a pond has so many human ashes dumped into it that its water is still gray, I think back to Ryuichi Sakamoto's moving performance I wrote about from the music festival in Barcelona. The children's voices he layered into the song were in my head. They were children wholly unaware of politics and history, concerned only with the present and guided by simple clarity of actions. They asked: "Are we doing the right thing?" If only their clarity could help deliver the right answers.

Poland has so much to see. So beautiful. So many photos. So much amazing food. And friends, too. Paul, who I met in Belgrade, Serbia, on his 16-month, world-spanning extravaganza, joined me in Krakow for bar hopping and the undying pursuit of perogies. And cheap, intra-European airfare rescues me again. With another absurdly inexpensive flight on Wizz Air, I return to Paris.

Things have been, surprisingly, rather free from catastrophe as of late. But there will be much less to say after this email — I'm packing it in and heading home early. Plans for the Czech Republic and Italy have been abandoned and Poland had to be curtailed.

In Warsaw, I reached the end of the financial line and moved up my flight home. While my final days on the road will be filled with good friends and good fun, this, unfortunately, is where the summer ends.

From Paris now (home, sweet home), I enter the final stretch. I conclude this trip with stops in Steinheim, Germany, London and New York. It's been an amazing ride since beginning this trip, three months 15 countries and thousands of kilometers ago.

Thanks for listening. Thanks for writing. Thanks for teasing. Thanks for suggesting and warning and updating and questioning. I hope you've enjoyed reading as much as I've enjoyed writing.

Until next time.