BR writes,

>Terezin is not a concentration camp,.....<

Just a minor point. If it says "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the entrance, it's a concentration camp.

From http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...t/terezin.html
"Of the vast majority of Czech Jews who were taken to Terezin (or Theresienstadt), 97,297 died among whom were 15,000 children. Only 132 of those children were known to have survived".

The drawings made by the children show what life was really like.

BigRuss has made some insightful comments about Terezin. The three things in Terezin that I found most affecting other than the children's pictures were the large, still new looking washroom with unused sinks lined up against the wall. It was constructed "for show" not for use. Another was the movie shown in the museum showing the "joyful," "happy" prisoners. Perhaps the most moving was on visiting the crematorium, the fellow in charge relating how they used young teenagers to feed bodies into, and remove ashes from, the oven. These kids would be isolated from the rest of the camp and work for about 3 months before being killed themselves so that they could not bear witness.

<I>ira on Mar 27, 09 at 10:31 AM

If it says "Arbeit Macht Frei" over the entrance, it's a concentration camp.</i>

To expand on that point sightly: the victims of concentration camps could be termed "incidental" deaths, because extermination was not their designed purpose.

Facilities like Sobibor and Birkenau, by contrast, were organized from the ground up as highly industrialized killing centers, replete with sorting facilities, gas chambers, and crematoria.

So yes, Dachau was truly a <I>Konzentrationslager</i>. The distinction is clear on this map: http://de.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?...ust-Europe.png

Hi; This expands on the happenings at this concentration camp. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/theresi...entration_camp iris1745/dick

I have uploaded some of my pictures including Terezin, and Lidice.

They may be of some interest.
Hope the link works
Muck

http://picasaweb.google.co.uk/Muckie...eat=directlink

Thank you for all the insight. For an organized tour of Dachua: who has gone with Sandemans, who has done Munich Walk Tours for Dachua?

Auschwitz-Birkenau is too 'tourist orientated'. Its visited by hundereds of thousands of people every year and they proudly display the figures on a board at the entrance (bit like a production factory boasting about it's output). I felt the tour, which is guided, was far too rushed and you have many other different nationalities all jabbering away in the background.

Dachau and Sachsenhausen feel more intense. Certainly in Dachau you need a heart of granite to get around. It's pretty gruesome but one i'd recommend especially as a first time visit.

Did two tours with Sandemans in Berlin. First was free, the second, which covered in more detail about the former DDR days of Berlin and cost about 10 euro.

I would definately recommend a tour with this company.

The guide who took us around Berlin really knew his history and i learned a lot. It was so good....i'm going back to Berlin again this year.

Instead of going to the well trodden, often very busy camps in Europe, it is sometimes more poignant to go to the ruined, ignored ones. Plaszow on the outskirts of Kraków. It is actually well known in the sense that it featured in "Schindler's List".
This link will give a flavour of what there is to see there.
http://krakow-bestguide.blogspot.co.uk/p/paszow.html

welcome to Fodors, Kitzkatz. Always check the dates of posts, especially if you use the search tool or google to find topics. This one is from 2009.

It may be a response to an old thread, but informative and useful nonetheless.