June 5/18 - Gdansk, Poland

I don’t really have a bucket list, but I thought that some day I would go to Auschwitz. It somehow seemed like an important thing to do. Although my father was born in Germany, he came to Canada before the war. Still, I guess I’ve always felt a bit of a connection with it. My father had an older half brother who chose not to come to Canada. He stayed and fought in the war, and died there. I don’t know any more of the story, as my father didn’t seem to have any more details, or perhaps he just didn’t want to discuss it with me. My dad had no desire to go to war, and fortunately, because he has almost no sight in his right eye, he was denied. Had he been made to serve in the Canadian army he would have, in essence, been fighting against his own half brother.

When I saw that this Viking trip offered the chance to go to a concentration camp, I thought that perhaps this might fill the desire, if you can call it that, to go to one, even if it wasn’t Auschwitz. The camp we went to is called Stutthof, and it’s about an hour’s drive from where we docked at Gdańsk. As you can imagine, it was an intense experience, but we aren’t sorry that we went. Our guide’s husband lost his grandfather in Auschwitz, so this camp visit is very hard for her. I asked her if Viking makes her lead this trip, and she said ‘no, I want to do it” although she doesn’t do it very often.

Stutthof was the last camp to be liberated at the end of the war. It started out with about 400 prisoners in 1939, and had 67,000 by 1945. As was the case in other countries, our guide acknowledged that there were people in Poland who knew what was happening but did nothing to stop it. Some even turned in their neighbours who were hiding Jews, as they were rewarded with vodka or some such thing.

Many of the buildings in the camp are no longer standing, but the ones that are had lots of photos, documentation forms, bowls for food (but no cutlery), bunks (the size for one person but instead holding three), a so-called hospital which had almost no medical aide, and the crematorium that we actually stood in. There was one enclosed case that had a huge mound of soles from people’s shoes.

There were two men that were largely responsible for the deaths at this camp. One was eventually executed, and the other ran away. When finally caught, he served very little time, which sadly was the case with most of the Nazi criminals.