Monday, August 12, 2013

Weekly Email - August 12th

Hi all,
Our library has been shut down for the month, and we are emailing from another library. The computer here has a hard time reading my voice recordings, and I can't figure out how to bring them up.
This past week has been rough here, we work 8 hours a day, every day, we are ALWAYS on the streets, and this week we had 1 street lesson. I feel like we are still grinding gears, but that is how most of my mission has been. 
I am not sure what they originally did, but the whole south of Poland used to be coal mining, so I assume it was that. People are starting to compliment my Polish more and more.
We went to Auschwitz and got there at 2:00, but to our surprise, they won't let you in without a tour guide until 3. We did not have time for the 3.5 hour tour (it is impossible on the mission), but we waited patiently until 3. We went into Auschwitz I (the one I saw last time) because there are 2 camps. The first has more museum exibits, and an original standing gas chamber and the like. Last time I did not get the pleasure of seeing the inside of the chamber or many of the exhibits. This time we saw it all, and we made it to Auschwitz II which is far larger (a.k.a. Birkineu) and has the gas chambers that were destroyed by the Nazis during their escape as well as the international monument "Forever let this place be a cry of despair and a warning to humanity, where the nazis murdered about one and a half milion men, women, and children, mainly Jews from various countries of europe".  "Niechaj na wieki będzie krzykiem rozpaczy i przestroga dla ludzkości to miesce, w którym hitlerowcy wymordowali około półtora miliona mężczyzn, kobiet, i dzieci, głównie żydów z różnych krajów Europy". The most intense part for me for some reason was the room with all of the shoes that the Nazis had taken from their prisoners. There was a Huge room stuffed full of all types of shoes, many were nice "sunday shoes" there were work shoes, street shoes, I think it made it much more real, these were real people from all different walks of life. That was rough.
The rest of the week was full of different things, we got to play soccer on Saturday with our branch president and a friend who will soon be investigating the gospel, and we played until I kicked the ball on the roof... oops...
Our branch has really been trying to help us out lately which is great. One member said we work very hard and she is glad we are there. 
Love you all, hope you can get the house pulled together and sold soon enough. Good for Kaj, I am glad to hear he got called to Sweden. 
Love you all,
Starszy Godwin











No comments:

Post a Comment