My Memoirs - Citizen of the World

Poland
For our trip to Poland, we flew in to Warsaw, its capital. We took
a city tour and visited the Old Town, which was rebuilt from
scratch after being almost completely destroyed by the Nazis in
1945. Warsaw is not the cold and dead city it was under
communist rule. The city has undergone a huge transformation.
Many of the old communist buildings gave way to modern
skyscrapers. It is still a very historical city, where we visited the
Royal Castle with its beautiful square; St. John’s Cathedral, a
Gothic church where some of the most important events took place
in the history of Poland; The Old Town Market Square; the former
Jewish Ghetto, which was the largest of the ghettos in Nazioccupied
Europe, the Royal Route, with its superb aristocratic
residences and famous monuments, where we saw the urn of
Fryderik Chopin, the famous composer; the Royal Park, where we
walked through the most beautiful parks of Warsaw and visited the
interior of the Palace of the Water, the lavish summer residence of
the last King of Poland.
From Warsaw, we travelled by bus to Krakow and took the city
tour. It is a city wrapped in legend, where every place is a moment
of history. It’s a city full of relics that reflect the most important
trends of European culture, including, the Royal Castle; the Gothic
St. Mary Basilica, where the deceased Pope John Paul II said
Mass when he was a Cardinal; galleries full of exhibits, cafes, pubs
and restaurants.
We continued our trip with a visit to Auschwitz, the largest of Nazi
Germany’s concentration and extermination camps during World
War II. It was the saddest place we have ever visited in all of our
travels around the world. We saw the interior of the gas chambers
and the crematoriums; the large bunk beds where the Jews inmates
would return to sleep after working from sunrise to sunset as slaves
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