Architecture

Five German men boarded my sleeper cabin on the eastern outskirts of Berlin. Clean-cut, efficiently German and very polite, they introduced themselves with the offer of a cold beer before asking if I could move to the top bunk. Seconds earlier, two of the men had argued with the train steward about whether or not they could turn the cabin into a mobile bar. Whether or not they understood his yelled Polish, my moving to the top bunk was enough to apparently license the cabin for an entire night's worth of drinking, card-playing, Germanic whooping and other forms of sleep-deprivation.

I only mention this so as to explain the reason why, ten hours later, I decided that it was perfectly sane to walk out of a train station in Krakow and head in a random direction sans map.

Obviously I had a homing beacon embedded in my chest - though I cannot determine whether it was implanted by a Soviet, industrialist or architectural historian - because the seven kilometre trek I ambled through that misty morning led me directly to the wonder that is Nowa Huta.

Back in the days of red flags marched down post-war avenues, Poland's soviet minders were embarrassed when the citizens of Krakow voted against communism. Due to the distressing proximity of WWII, the Soviets decided that a violent realignment of political opinions was not the way forward, so instead developed an idea that shares alarming similarities with the capitalist darling known as "franchising".

Villages to the east of Krakow were relocated, and a gigantic steel factory, double the size of Krakow's historic centre, was constructed. To feed this mill (Nowa Huta means "New Steel Mill"), the Soviets built a proletariat utopia between Krakow and the factory, filling it with the heroes of communist ideology: the working class.

Of course, the working class couldn't be trusted to uphold communism on their own, especially when they would be too busy toiling in the mills and bringing down bourgeois Krakow, so Soviet architects developed ways that could automate a grand, red community.

This is why Nowa Huta is arranged in a semi-circular pattern, formed by five districts that are intersected by wide avenues terminating at a glorious, central plaza. Each district is walled, with limited entrances built under the nicer apartments (home to the "more equal" citizens who policed the comings and goings of residents). Just in case anything went awry, such as an invasion, these entrances were wide enough to fit a defensive tank.

Within these walled districts could be found schools, shops and anything else required by a community. The logic was that by looking inwards, the residents would support/spy on each other, becoming a fiercely loyal unit of workers that could successfully outweigh the protests of middle-class Krakow.

Unfortunately, these grim, prison walls provided the opposite effect, and Nowa Huta became a stronghold for the anti-communist workers' solidarity union in the 1980s. To add insult to injury, the central square which once held a statue of Lenin, is now called Ronald Reagan Road.

The main gates of the factory proper stand a short tram ride away from the residential districts of Nowa Huta. Here social realist architects built imposing twin blocks for grim administration, sweeping out from the stone and steel workers' entrance like the burly arms of an overbearing mother-monster. Between their elbows, at the point where a screaming child could be suffocated, was once a glorious square with enough space to cram hundreds of thousands of workers as a demonstration of Soviet might. Though, the Soviets were not completely naive in their idealism; the floral crenelations above the administrative buildings served the dual purpose of evoking the Venetian doge's palace whilst also providing suitable cover for snipers.

And here I found myself thinking about another building, a train's journey behind me, designed by a logic that, technically, can be found on the opposite end of the political spectrum...

Spittle-lipped Minnesota Jim stood outside the former Luftwaffe headquarters in Berlin, gesticulating at the bare plaza surrounded on three sides by bullying blocks of straight, unadorned Nazi architecture.

"When a person stood here at the gate, they would find themselves being surrounded on all sides by the building, as if it were closing in to crush them. This was on purpose - it was Hitler's idea that at no time should any citizen feel equal to or, worse, above the Empire."

I wonder if the factory workers at Nowa Huta felt this when they were dwarfed by the buildings that supposedly celebrated their steel brotherhood? In hindsight, perhaps the blueprints of Nowa Huta prophesied Russia's evolution from united glory to grinding dictatorship.

Now, hopefully I won't slip a disk by twisting backwards in such an awkward way, but there is one striking example of Nazi architecture that did not opt for the gargantuan. Instead, this style sought to crush and consume its victims through its diminutive size - albeit, with many such small buildings working in concert like the villi of the intestine, thus digesting in catastrophic numbers.

I'd spoken to a lot of people about their experiences at Auschwitz-Birkenau - as tourists - before I hopped on the over-heated, 90 minute bus ride to see it for myself. Some found it appalling that fast food could be easily bought at its entrance, and there were even a few wry comments about how the shepherding of tourist hordes mimicked a more bestial practice of the past. I shared a dinner with three French boys the night before I went, and they spoke of how harrowing the experience had been - two were affected by the curated nature of the Auschwitz museum, while the third was most moved when given the freedom of imagination by the unadorned starkness of Birkenau.

For this reason, I'd already created a picture of the concentration camps in my mind, a map of my expected emotional journey. However, like my quixotic journey to Nowa Huta, I managed to stumble completely off track.

From the moment I stepped off the bus, there was a darkness stirring in my body. Each step unsettled more and more mud from the well of my stomach, pumping a noxious cloud of despair upwards where it billowed into my mind. By the time I'd reached the information desk I was unable to think properly - not out of the sadness that caused so many tourists to cry, but more from a claustrophobic buzzing in my ears. Disoriented by this, I was conveyed into the small, neat streets of barb-wired Auschwitz I.

Many of the buildings here hold exhibtions, containing pictures, documents and, what I found to be the most horrifying, piled heaps of Nazi souvenirs: smashed spectacles, shoes, clothing and hair. Every room I walked through spotted mold clusters of weeping tourists, some muttering amongst themselves or standing in painful silence around Holocaust art installations. The swarm behind my eyes made me anxious to keep moving, to stay away from their crowded corridors, and so I passed amongst them like a ghost.

I couldn't help but try and imagine what it must've been like to be incarcerated here. History has exposed the knowledge of mass murder, but back in those dark ages inmates would have had only the barest rumours to eulogise their vanished companions. It was so cold in that grey place, and I wore so many layers to quench my shivering - a deeper chill injected itself through my mind's vein when I saw the threadbare prison uniforms. Here was a place that had no other purpose but to kill anything it touched.

I walked three kilometres to the next museum, that of Auschwitz II-Birkenau. Unlike its smaller cousin, this site has no signs, no exhibtions: it shouts through the mere fact of standing as it was left. Here stood block after block of housing, once stables for 56 horses, but modified to hold upwards of 400 people apiece. Each building sported a chimney for a spine and the bulk of Birkenau, burnt by the SS, now stands as a forest of red brick obelisks as far as the bleary eye can bare to see.

From here I walked along train tracks, those infamous tributaries that terminated at the selection platforms. Along their left side were more detention blocks in a better state of repair. One of these slapped its doors at me, again and again in an effort to grab my dizzy attention. With no other signs apparent, I took this as my necessary direction and entered the forlorn building.

The floor was the first thing I noticed, buckled and torn by the earth's attempts to reject it. And then I saw the bunks, in tiers of three, for the purpose of stacking prisoners in amounts beyond what is humanely comfortable. This was too much for my head, besieged as it was by the black storm, and I spent the next hour walking aimlessly, unable to notice anything else with my eyes.