Auschwitz: tourist E-Ticket IF YOU TRAVEL TO POLAND you will understand Auschwitz 10 years ago I took my stepdaughter who lives in Marseille on our annual 5 day trip over Christmas holiday I've taken her to Tahiti I've taken her to Amsterdam and as a Jew I've always wanted to go to Auschwitz. to see the brooding gray skies, somber buildings and the famous railroad station with that monstrous iconic Gate where millions of Jews we're gassed and burned. We traveled to Warsaw , devoured creamed herring and sausage and spent time in the Christmas fairs. I was shocked to see anti-semetic graffiti in numerous locations. still it had a deeper meaning to me because this is where during World War II so many people were murdered and ghettoized in Warsaw. We then traveled to Kraków to experience the same joyful Christmas fair, Chopin museumand bought our E ticket for an Auschwitz tour. I call it an E ticket because unlike the horrors you see on TV not the ones during the war but currently they're always dark and dreary gray skies cloudy skies the infamous gate that was my expectations of the bus trip from Kraków to Auschwitz when I arrive there however I saw bright sunny blue skies and dozens of tour buses line up in a disneylike parking lot. Ironically there was a luggage stand where you could store your luggage while you toured the crematoriu:. No compassion zero sensitivity! the grossest thing of all was the hotdog stand where you could buy yourself hotdog and fries and onions before touring the death camp and the ovens, I'm only posting a 3 photos but two of which really stood out to me one is is a room filled with shoes. The other is a picture of a happy bearded Jew grasping a penny in one hand and a valise in the other. I bought that petit gem of racism from a souvenir stand in a main laneway because the Poles still think of Jews in that way as the moneylenders with the big beard and the hat gripping onto a penny. I bought that little trinket which hangs in the entryway of my house: a memento of that E-ticket to Auschwitz and that goddam hotdog stand directly in front of THE Gate!