The Workers’ Lift

Poland, 2015

The elevator left without us.

Dani and I stood in an empty underground dining hall, twelve hundred feet beneath Poland, while employees stacked chairs around us and prepared to lock up for the night. There was only one way out now—the workers’ lift.

We squeezed into the small cage with our guide and a handful of employees. The gates slammed shut. Then we flew upward.

My ears popped and re-popped as the pressure changed. The acceleration first pinned me to my feet, then seemed to lift me onto my toes. Wind roared through the cage as we shot a quarter mile upward in seconds.

Next to me, Dani screamed.

~

Earlier that evening, the train doors slid shut behind us as we sprinted onto the platform at Wieliczka. Every guidebook we’d read insisted this transfer couldn’t be done—both Auschwitz and Wieliczka via public transportation in a single day—yet we’d made it here just in time for the last tour.

Our guide filled the tour with salty puns. Every chamber inspired another one. The miners were “seasoned veterans,” it’s history worth taking “with a grain of salt.” I laughed at most of them at the time but couldn’t remember why by the end.

For two miles, we traveled through the caverns and corridors—a fraction of the hundreds the mine contained. Then, the tunnel opened without warning into a chamber so large it felt impossible. Massive log columns rose from floor to ceiling like the trunks of redwoods. Our flashlight beams vanished into the darkness above. Below me, my footsteps softened as we crossed a wooden bridge over an underground lake.

Then chamber narrowed again, then widened into something stranger.

“Church of the underworld,” our tour guide said.

Salt crystal statues—dwarfs, saints, and kings lined the passages, glowing softly through our guide’s lantern and sparkling as he passed. I looked up, radiant, salt crystal chandeliers hung from the vaulted ceiling, while mosaic salt-tile designs sparkled under Dani’s feet.

I brushed my fingers across the hand-tooled grooves left by centuries of pickaxes. Every mark had been cut by someone standing exactly where I stood. Nearby, I saw an altar where they prayed, a place where they worshipped.

“Just don’t lick the walls,” the tour guide joked. “Saints don’t taste good, no matter how you salt them.”

~

On the way out, we stopped for thirty minutes at a gift shop selling salt lamps, bath salts, salt shot glasses, and rock salt candy. Nobody in our group seemed interested. We stood around waiting for the guide to return.

Then we walked to the dining hall, and the elevator left without us.