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Ants & Jo

Taxi for two from Bangkok to Brighton? Ants Bolingbroke-Kent and Jo Huxter aim to cross 12 countries by tuk-tuk, and raise £50,000 for Mind.
Entry: 22

The girls steer Ting Tong towards Brighton and home. First, Poland beckons.

Auschwitz, Poland

Ants writes ...

Driving into Poland was like entering a new world. Within 20 kilometres we had spotted a Tesco and a McDonalds. Gleaming BP and Shell Garages were in place of their more disheveled Ukrainian and Russian counterparts. A surfeit of shiny new road signs marched along the roadside and everywhere the EU stars reminded you of Poland's new identity. Never before had Jo or I seen so many road signs. It's as if Poland has gone overboard in an attempt to become a typical EU nation.

As if to complement our grey moods at having entered the western world, at about 5 pm the heavens opened, much to the disdain of TT's temperamental sparks. They didn't force us to a standstill but it did slow us down. That and non-stop road works meant that at 10pm we were still 100 kilometres short of Krakow....at which point Ting Tong threw yet another tukking tantrum, suddenly emitting an alarming hissing sound from within the depths of her engine.

She'd hissed before, but this was a different matter, and Jo demanded that we stop and investigate further. I was all for limping on to Krakow and dealing with the problem in the fresh light of morning, but Jo, being the sensible one, decided otherwise. So we pulled into the next petrol station and for the second time that day went through the rigmarole of unscrewing the driver's seat to get into the engine. The Chief Mechanic, AKA Jo, swiftly identified a large hole in the air hose, which after a bit of fiddling looked like it was sorted, and we carried on. Ten minutes later TT was hissing again, but this time we decided there was no more we could do so ploughed on to Krakow. We pulled up outside our hotel at 12.30am, dizzy with fatigue, and after a glass of wine fell into bed and passed out. God what a day, certainly our longest yet at 15 ½ hours - and probably the hardest.

The next morning we headed straight for the nearest mechanic and then south-west out of Krakow, in the general direction of Prague. Our last stop in Poland was Oswiecim, better known by its German name, Auschwitz, a name synonymous with unfathomable cruelty and suffering. Under gathering rain clouds we covered up TT and headed into Birkenau, the first of the two museums here. Although less famous than its neighbour, Birkenau - which held up to 100,000 prisoners - was where the Nazis murdered hundreds of thousands of Jews, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and any one else they felt like. Although the SS, sensing defeat, tried to cover up evidence of their atrocities much of the camp still remains and as you wander around among the endless lines of barbed wire fencing and blown up gas chambers and crematoriums you get a sense of the scale of the Nazi operation. It felt suitable that it was such a dank, miserable day. At the far end is a massive monument in memory of those who died here, which states, in every European language, 'Let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to all humanity...'. It's shocking to think that what happened here was only 62 years ago, and that so many innocents endured such horror.

Next stop was Auschwitz, three kilometres down the road. Established in 1940 for Polish political prisoners it was expanded in 1941-2 to take in European Jews from as far away as Corfu, Greece and Hungary. No one quite knows how many people died here and at Birkenau. As the war progressed the Nazis didn't bother registering their victims. They just unloaded them straight off the trains and into the gas chambers. Tragically, many of the Jews who arrived here had been duped by the Nazis into believing they had been transported for 'resettlement'; the Nazis sold them non-existent plots of land and offered them work in fictitious shops and factories.

Of course I knew about the Holocaust before, and how disgustingly bigoted and cruel it was, but it wasn't until we walked round Auschwitz that it truly sunk in. Seeing those thousands of photographs, the piles of belongings, reading about the tales of heroic resistance movements, seeing the conditions the prisoners were forced to exist in ... harrowing is not the word, and not for the first time history made me cry. Almost worst of all was a photo of a woman who had weighed 70 kg when she arrived, but at the time of the photograph she was a pathetic 25 kg. As in Volgograd I was left horrified at humanity's capacity for cruelty and mass destruction.

"Harrowing is not the word, and not for the first time history made me cry."

Everyone knows about the Holocaust, but less people are aware of how badly the Poles suffered at the dual hands of Hitler and Stalin in WWII. Both men set out to wipe Poland off the map, again, and by 1945 Poland had lost over 20% of its prewar population. Worst off were its intelligentsia, whom Hitler and Stalin feared the most. 57% of Poland's lawyers, 40% of its doctors and 30% of its university lecturers were murdered by these two megalomaniacs. It's no surprise that the handful of Polish pilots who fought for us in the Battle of Britain were some of the most lethal fighters we had.

Only two days left of this journey. Can't get my head round it but at the moment we are so occupied with the matter of getting Ting Tong home that there isn't the headspace to worry about what Sunday will be like or what will happen after.

That's all for now. Hope to do another diary before we finish.


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