Kraków has, unexpectedly, one of the nicest airports I’ve ever traveled through. I’ve seen a lot of airports, so I can say that with some authority. I had landed and wandered through to baggage claim only to discover a detailed sign in English and Polish explaining the three ways to get into town — train or bus or taxi — along with prices and schedules and well-marked paths to find each.

The return trip was similar. Brightly marked signs warned that security was “near capacity” but still had me through in under ten minutes. The airport is clean and well-lit and about as cheery as a modern airport filled with corporate chains can be. I’m sitting in a clean lounge waiting for flight to take off, and I can honestly say I’d love to come back and see more of the city.

My previous experience of Poland¹ has been Warsaw and Wrocław. Warsaw struck me as grey and industrial, nearly ruined by the concrete slabs of architecture so loved by Soviet bureaucrats and hated by everybody else. Wrocław was great, if a little small and touristy, but my stay was skewed by the circumstances.²

So when I say Kraków is better than I expected, I don’t mean to say that I thought it would be bad; just that to the extent I expected anything I expected something between Warsaw and Wrocław. And it turns out it’s so much nicer than that implies. A lot of the grand architecture has survived, so rambling through the Old Town is pleasant,³ and it feels like there’s almost always an inviting café or a nice restaurant to relax in. Maybe I’d get a bit tired of it after a couple of weeks — it can be a little much, at times — but I’d love to give it a try.

I attended Portal 10 while I was here, a larp convention in Eastern Europe that’s somewhat obscure in Western Europe. That’s a little curious, because it’s founded directly as an answer to KP, the big Nordic Larp convention that’s been running since 1997. It’s bringing together a broader range of larp cultures⁴ and doing so with an explicit mandate to be affordable, with affordable in this case meaning free to attend.⁵

And I love KP, having attended every year since 2016.⁶ It’s got more varied talks and better opportunities to socialize, not least of which because it’s just that much bigger. But it’s undeniable there are things which are just as interesting and just as exciting happening elsewhere in larp, and Portal 10 drew in a lot of that, from a viewpoint that’s just not as commonly represented in the circles I frequent.

This is going to always be a struggle. Nothing can be completely inclusive; it’s nearly impossible to cater simultaneously to those who want a nice dinner and a snug bed and those who are willing to sleep on the floor and get by on the value menu at Burger King. Most KPs offer some kind of sponsored ticket for those who would otherwise be shut out of attending. That’s a decent start. But it would be nice to see more people from Northern European larp scene attending Portal as well. Conversations can’t happen if there’s nobody there to have them.

I did some limited touring around the Old Town,⁷ and headed out into the suburbs for Nowa Huta⁸ and the Wieliczka Salt Mine.⁹ But I also took time to go out and visit Auschwitz. If there’s any good argument for having a list of places you’re “supposed to see” and following it slavishly, maybe this is it. I didn’t want to visit. There’s a good chance I wouldn’t have if I didn’t have that list; I dreaded going. But everyone should visit, at least once. We owe at least that much to the dead.

Auschwitz is actually composed of dozens of subcamps organized around three main ones, and entering Auschwitz I — the administrative center and first camp to be constructed — the real horrors are neatly hidden away. The buildings are well built, with ample windows for light and handrails in the stairwells. It wasn’t designed from the start as a death camp.

The cruelty and the atrocities grew over time, a series of intentional and unintentional decisions building atop of one another. The first thirty prisoners were German criminals, brought in as functionaries, and they established a standard of sadism and brutality towards the subsequent inmates. The first crematoria were built to handle prisoners who died of sickness or execution. The first shipments of Zyklon B were intended as insecticide.

What struck me, visiting, is how each decision reinforced and followed the previous ones. The first prisoners arrived in May 1940. By August 1941 they started experimenting with Zyklon B on Soviet POWs. Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the second camp, was under construction by October 1941,¹⁰ and the first all-Jewish transports began arriving by early 1942. There’s a long, twisting path from a prison camp operated with depraved indifference to human life, to one deliberately designed to work prisoners to death, to one explicitly designed to murder millions. You can track every step they took.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau is the camp that looks like you’re expecting. It’s massive, with row after row of wooden bunkhouses. The train tracks are still there, along with one of the cars used to transport Jews to the camp. You can stand where they were all ordered to disembark, to line up to be examined by a doctor, to write their names on their belongings in chalk so they could find them again after the showers.

This is all history, of course, except to the extent that it isn’t. In 1996 a scholar developed a model of the ten stages most genocides pass through, ranging from “Classification” (dividing people into us vs. them) and “Discrimination” (restricting voting rights or access to health care) all the way to “Extermination” (mass killings) and “Denial” (covering up the evidence). Every stage is harder to deescalate, but even so offers opportunities to stop and turn back.

Barbara F. Walter, the author of How Civil Wars Start, estimates the United States is somewhere between “Dehumanization” (denying the humanity of groups) and “Organization” (the establishment of militias). This probably feels alarmist — it feels alarmist to me — but at the same time it’s hard to deny the signs are there. Just a few years ago the United States built a series of concentration camps to detain immigrants seeking asylum.

There are plenty of off ramps, if we choose to take them. I still think saner heads will ultimately prevail. But that doesn’t feel like a certainty, to me. And if things do fall apart, I think they’re going to fall apart much faster than we imagine they will.

I don’t mean to be depressing. I certainly doubt if the worst happens in the United States it’ll resemble Nazi Germany in the particulars. But it still feels like we’re in an extraordinarily unstable time, where just about anything could happen. Maybe the fall of Roe v. Wade will spur a massive backlash against the GOP. Maybe the Jan 6^th hearings will cause a broad repudiation of the politics of the past administration. Or maybe the steady loss of voting rights means we’re already past the point where we can course correct safely. I don’t think anyone knows.

So I’m traveling, and trying to strategize for the future. Hope for the best, plan for the worst. All I’m sure of is, whether things change for the better or the worse in the United States, every step we take makes the next one easier.

Next: Belgrade (BEL) to London (LHR)
Prev: Stockholm (ARN) to Kraków (KRK)

Footnotes

¹ Polish cities, anyway. Thanks to larp, I’ve been to more Polish castles than I have big Polish cities.

² I was crashing for the night there after a larp only to discover Lufthansa had canceled my flight out due to a strike. The strike lasted the better part of a week, so I got to stay in a hotel paid for by Lufthansa and spend afternoons and evenings hanging out with the dozen or so other larpers who were in the same boat.

³ At least as much as the temperature will allow; if I return I hope to do so in spring or autumn.

⁴ Ironically, since KP itself was created in part to bring together disparate larp cultures. Of course, those larp cultures were Sweden, Finland, Norway, and Denmark. The diversity represented has gotten better, but it’s still dominated by those larp traditions, if only because that’s overwhelmingly where the attendees come from.

⁵ The cost for KP varies depending on the organizers; they typically make a pretty good effort to keep costs down, but you can usually expect to pay at least 350€, and often much more. That’s a struggle for a lot of potential attendees even in Scandinavia. For countries that aren’t as wealthy, it’s often entirely out of reach.

To be sure, it’s not a fair comparison. Portal is shorter, and doesn’t even attempt to put people up or feed them — a serious drawback, since it means people are constantly leaving the convention for food or to go back to their rooms — but it does make it about as affordable as is possible.

⁶ With the obvious exception for 2020

⁷ I had a local show me around Wawel Hill, and I can’t speak highly enough about having a sarcastic and jaded local point out the touristy parts of town for you.

⁸ One of the only two grand social realist settlements ever built. It was designed to showcase the superiority of Soviet social planning, and it’s nowhere near as dreadful as that sounds. It’s filled with parks and greenery and broad avenues and genuinely nice if not stunning architecture.

Budgets, bureaucracy, and the explosive need for new housing probably killed the ability to replicate it elsewhere in the Soviet Union. That’s a tragedy. It’s the only Soviet planned suburb I’ve ever walked through where I thought, even in passing, that it looked like a nice place to live.

⁹ Continuously operating since the 1200s, although they’re no longer mining it. It’s mostly a event space and tourist venue these days, filled with banquet halls and concert halls and tunnels with statues and dioramas of historical mining — worth it for the kitsch value alone — but the real gem is St. Kinga’s Chapel, a massive chapel carved out of the salt, with massive salt crystal chandeliers and sculptures and and altar all overseen by St. Kinga, patron saint of salt miners.

¹⁰ The third main camp, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, served as a labor camp for IG Farben. One of the subsidiaries of IG Farben produced the Zyklon B used in the camps. I mostly know the name because it crops up a lot in Gravity’s Rainbow, as befits a novel absolutely preoccupied with exterminations.