This week I have been fortunate enough to travel to Krakow in Poland. I absolutely love travelling, as it broadens the mind so much, just through exposure to different cultures.
There is so much to be gained simply from just walking around.
I feel that everyone should travel if and when they get the opportunity. I’m not talking about going to lay by a swimming pool in a resort, instead go and immerse yourself in the local culture. Learn something about the place you’ve gone to. Try the local cuisine, venture off the beaten track. Take it all in.
However, with being in Krakow there were two places I insisted on visiting. The salt mines and Auschwitz. The salt mines because it’s a stunning example of nature and engineering in harmony over centuries and genuinely a really interesting place to visit. Auschwitz, on the other hand is because I felt compelled to go.
It is a place that is a real melting pot of emotion. Sadness, astonishment and anger pretty much sums it up for me. To have been somewhere where such atrocities were carried out is an incredibly humbling experience, and knowing that yesterday I walked along a railway track that delivered over one million people to their demise. You can’t begin to imagine the terror experienced by those who arrived at what turned out to be the extermination camp. Men, woman, children. Old and young. All treated with such barbarism.
This is why it is important for me to travel. To learn and see first hand the places where such evil happened. You learn from it and it helps shape your life into ensuring you do everything in your power to ensure it never happens again. It puts new light on the political parties you vote for and their policies and behaviours. And that’s not even going as far as the morals of those who stand in office.
We owe it to ourselves, to our children, our family, our friends and all those who come after us to make the world a better place. We owe it to ourselves to educate to learn from lessons of those who’ve been before us.
“Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.
George Santayana
Happy Damn Friday! x
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