Life on the Vine

Last night before heading to bed I did a quick search to scan through the day's news headlines and a Los Angeles Times article caught my eye.  Here is a link to the story: On anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation, world remembers Holocaust amid signs of rising hate . Yesterday was International Holocaust Remembrance Day, and the 73rd anniversary of the Soviet army liberating the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps in occupied Poland.  I wanted to mark and remember that day by spending some time today sharing photos from our visit to Auschwitz-Birkenau two weekends ago. I think, like most American students, my first exposure and introduction to the Holocaust came through reading Night by Elie Wiesel.  In the book, Wiesel shares his experiences in Auschwitz and Buchenwald during 1944-1945.  Wiesel and his family were among an estimated 430,000 Hungarian Jews deported to the death camp.   His father died just three months before liberation and his mother and l...

I lived in Germany for nearly three years, moving back to the states in 2012.  Tom had moved back to the states about 10 months ahead of me.  While living overseas, Tom and I did a good amount of traveling.  Some of it together and some of it solo.  Trips included Italy, France, Austria, Czech Republic, Netherlands, England, Scotland, Malta, Latvia, Belgium, Romania, Spain and of course traveling around Germany.  Our travels, however, never included Poland. When we moved back overseas last year, this time moving to Italy, I promised myself we would not leave Europe again without getting ourselves over to Poland.  The main draw for me was getting to Auschwitz-Birkenau .  I'm going to dedicate a separate blog post about our visit there but I want to first share about our time in Kraków. We had a long weekend in January over the Martin Luther King Jr. Day, and we were trying to figure out what to do.  We had originally planned on driving south of...