After leaving the wedding venue on Monday morning, we made our way past Krakow and to Auschwitz, about 60 km past the city. We'd planned to spend the day there before our evening flight, and even though it would've been a fairly depressing end to our fun wedding break, it was somewhere we'd all wanted to visit. Using the Sat Nav to get us there, we happened to start off at Auschwitz-Birkenau which was the second camp and around 3 km from Auschwitz I. We didn't have an organise tour or guide booked, but were able to walk freely around the site, which is huge, much bigger than I had expected. You can still see the entrance gate, the railway track and ramp and many old barracks. Inside the site, you can also see the buildings where incoming prisoners were shaved and given their "new" clothing, the ruins of the five gas chambers, ponds where the ashes of thousands of people were dumped without ceremony, and a memorial site. It really was quite a harrowing experience, and landed up spending a good few hours walking around there before making our way over to Auschwitz I.

Auschwitz I was the first camp to be used (therefore called Stammlager). It consists of old Polish military barracks. Inside some of the barracks was a range of information material, boards, photos and personal belongings to illustrate the life and cruelties of the camp. The only remaining gas chamber is in Auschwitz I but was reconstructed to its wartime layout after the war had ended. In order to walk around the site you need an official tour guide to show you around, and luckily, since there were seven of us we were able to do it as private tour.

Unfortunately we were a bit rushed towards the end of the tour in order to get back to the airport in plenty of time, but we certainly covered the majority of what we wanted to see. As terrible and awful as it was walking around there and listening to some of the stories, I'm really glad I've done it and got a better understanding of it, rather than just from what we were taught in school or from reading about it.

From Auschwitz we were back in the car and made our way to the airport where we returned the car and found ourselves a seat upstairs at sine bistro bar which served warm food and cold beer, just what we all wanted before our flight back to London after a brilliant few days in Poland.