Holocaust Tours
 

I am interested in any information anyone may have in regards to touring Holocaust sights. I am particularly interested in visiting Poland and its surrounding areas. Normally I prefer not to travel with a tour group but I think I would miss out on so much if I tried to do this without a well informed guide. If anyone has ever done a tour of this type and can make recommendations, I would really appreciate it. I will be leaving from the U.S. and will have about 5-8 days. Thanks!!!

For what it's worth, we recently drove from Krakow to Auschwitz with no problem. It's perhaps an hour, maybe 1-1/2 drive, even on a country road.
Auschwitz itself had plenty of English signage; each of the barracks (or whatever they're called) was a separate topic (e.g., French Holocaust, Gypsy Holocaust, Bulgarian Holocaust, etc). Birkenau, a mile away, is/was a far larger camp, by the way (perhaps 8X bigger?).
We normally travel without a guide, altho we had Michael Osman in Paris for a day last fall. Frankly, if he had been in Auschwitz with us, I don't think the experience would have been any more fulsome. I can't speak for other Holocaust places in Poland, though. A possible downside to a tour guide might be that a guide's tour might spend an hour informing the group, then leave for the next town on the tour, leaving you wishing you could get a more in-depth experience. On our own, we probably spent 2-1/2 hours just wandering among the exhibits.(My wife likes to read any and all written material in museums; the Nazis, with their penchant for meticulous documentation, gave her plenty of material to read).

With 5-8 days, I wouldn't try to cover too much ground, there are Shoah sites all over Europe of course.
Different from Auschwitz is Terezin, near Prague. It was a transit camp, not a death camp per se, though most inhabitants died of starvation and disease. It was also the site of a hoax perpetrated on the Red Cross inspectors, who did not look beyond the surface of what they were being shown.
Prague itself might make a nice break during your trip. In Prague, both Precious Legacy and Wittmann agencies offer guided tours of Terezin.

If you take a tour of Holocaust sights, DONT use Orbis. They are the former official Polish travel agency and they play down Jewish deaths and put them together with Poles and others. We used them a couple of years ago to go to the Salt mine outside of Krakow and it was as close to an anti-semitic tour guide, I've ever had. In Kazmierz [Krakow], there may be a Jewish tour of the camps. We took a Jewish walking tour of Kazmierz and it was very good. there was a bookstore in the center that arranged tours. I have visited many camps and the horror never goes away.

Polite suggestion: try reading history accounts of the development of the holding/concentration camps by the Germans. Plot a trip by their establishment date. It might also be interesting to compare them with the USA camps used to isolate persons of Japanese nationality.

I think that what the US did to its citizens of Japanese origin was terrible, but the Nazi camps were beyond any comparison.

I just found this company through a google

http://www.eurohistour.com/05central.htm

they have tours of Central Europe that include many Holocaust sites. The tour seems to be longer than you want, but you may try inquiring about shorter tours, or doing only part of the longer one.

When Art & I went to Auschwitz about 4 years ago there were volunteer tour guides. We were in a group of about 20 people - very informal and respectful. We were on our own at the main facility to look around and then the tour guide led us through the buildings. We then went to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp about a kilometer from the main camp. Quite a sight to put it mildly. Our tour guide was a Polish man whose family had to move 3 times and give their home to the Germans due to their need of materials and room to build their evil killing operations. I don't know if they still have the guides but he was most knowledgable. We traveled on our own to visit the Pleszow (Schindler's List) concentration camp. It is totally gone and only a memorial remains. When I went to Dachau about 10 years ago my brother-in-law and I could not help but listen in to a tour guide and "accidently" joined the group. The speaker was a former inmate and spoke to my brother-in-law and I most graciously during the tour. He was from the former Czechoslavakia and said he would have died except the camp doctor that he worked for gave him his daily slice of bread. You cannot help but be moved by stories such as these.

The Canadian camps for Japanese aliens and Japanese-Canadians were pretty bad. Of course, again, no way comparable to what happened under the Nazis or the Empire of Japan.

We did run across an apparently little known holcaust site next to the Frankfurt airport. It's a memorial wood in Walldorf on the south side of the airport.

Hungarian Jewish women were brought in towards the end of the war to improve the runways for the new German jet aircraft. Their camp was in the wooded area at the northern edge of Walldorf. The wood has a circular walking path with plaques, photos, and descriptions of what happened at stations here and there.

There's not much left of the camp itself--some rubble here, concrete steps there.

Using my high school and college German (last studied over 30 years before) and a German-English dictionary, I was able to piece together the story from the explantory notes, photos, and copies of letters on the plaques.

It was simple and moving--apparently the local school children had found out about the camp and organized a campaign to set up the memorial.

http://www.kz-walldorf.de/

When I went to Auschwitz/Birkenau, I used the Krakow City Tours. You paid at the hotel and caught the bus at the nearest stop to your hotel. It took an hour and the English-speaking guide talked about it before we arrived. Once we got there we saw a movie and a guide from inside the camp took us around. When we finished there, the bus took us to Birkenau and the original guide gave us the information.

The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. has produced a comprehensive account of the Holocaust. It is titled, Historical Atlas of the Holocaust. The story begins in 1933 and continues to 1950. This book could well serve you as a trip planning guide.

Rufus,
Thanks for that website, I speak no German and am trying to translate it as best I can with every aid available.
It's fascinating.

Muck

Try this url Mucky

http://66.94.231.168/language/transl...ge&who=gsp

It seems to have translated a fair amount of the info.

Thanks trip !!

Muck

Mass tourism is annoying enough in "classic" sites, such as châteaux and museums, but it is downright indecent in former concentration camps. I visited Buchenwald (former East Germany) and Mauthausen (Austria) last summer, and both had comprehensive explanations, guide books, visitor centers, etc. in all languages. This is no Disneyland, it boils down to a very personal and heavy experience, which, IMHO, would only be spoiled with tour groups. The Italian RV invasion was outrageous enough in Mauthausen, with loud families hanging their laundry meters away from the entrance of the camp.

I agree that that some large groups have no business being there, or anywhere. This past spring I was at the Holocaust memorial in the Jewish Quarter in Prague, and a group of Italian teenagers was so rude (talking loudly on cell phones, laughing loudly, yelling back at the guards who were asking them to be quiet), but I blame the teachers or parents who brought them there and who obviously weren't insisting on any decorum.

However, a well-guided small group, there for the purposes of learning and trying to grasp even an iota of the horror, helps to educate people, and that in itself has value.

I went to a few sites and saw some of the things that Elaine and Art have mentioned (such as one fishwife exclaiming loudly that she didn't believe the Holocaust occured). It is a shame that people behave in such as fashion, that being said it is important to learn about what happened. If you choose a small tour group it shouldn't be a problem.

As an aside, if you ever visit Los Angeles you should drop by the Museum of Tolerance on the West Side. I covers not only the Holocaust, but numerous other events ranging from the lynchings during the American Reconstruction to modern times. It's well worth a visit.

My wife and I have been to both Auschwitz (near Krakow) and Dachau (near Munich). We are not Jewish, but we felt we owed all respect to those who suffered there. Lest we forget.

Auschwitz is immense, grim, numbing in its precision and purpose. Reminded us of a giant machine, now rusting.

Dachau is sanitized, almost park-like, and sterile. A facade. Social propaganda.

Of the two, we felt Auschwitz conveyed the horror, while Dachau evaded it. One was dramatic, the other was historical.

You can do both on your own. But Auschwitz-Birkenau is best visited with a guide. If you are going to Krakow, I am sure you can arrange a tour. You will come away with many questions.

trip--thanks for the link! I'd figured out a lot on my own on the original website, but this fills in some big gaps for us.

I keep forgetting about the translation option on Yahoo and other search sites.

Rufus: Yes the translation feature on the search engines is great when looking at less touristy places like Hungary.

I am planning a trip to Europe april 2006 and am going to hungary poland czech republic. And it is great when trying to view some of the sites from these places.

Apparently all of these areas have informative and not so touristy memorials to the holocaust.

There seems to be quite a bit of info regarding holocaust memorials on the net and any google or yahoo search will give you hours of info.

Here are a couple i have found

http://www.shoaheducation.com/camps/location.html
http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/...st/cclist.html

Also there is quite a bit of info regarding the Schindler jews and different places like his factory in Krakow which would be interesting to see.
This site details a tour in Krakow
http://www.scrapbookpages.com/poland...zimierz01.html

I have heard very similiar stories to what USNR has said regarding the handling of certain sites so would be a good idea to find out which ones you wouldn't want to waste your time at.

A little bit off the track, but my only experience has been the Holocaust museum in Washington DC and i felt it was very good in the way it detailed the holocaust. Though one person was a little bit offended with idea of people being given an indentity card and being herded into the elevator that starts the exhibition in order to give a small idea of what it may have been like for a prisoner being treated this way.

There were quite a few people who became very emotional when viewing the exhibits, and i think if you are going to one of these or any other memorials detailing 20th century atrocity i guess it's best to be mindful that there may be people there who have first hand experience regarding these places.

Hi! I have a professional, registered tour guide contact based in Prague and she organises trips to Terezin and Auschwitz etc.

Her name is Karolina. Mention Mark from HotelRaider.

[email protected]

Thanx to everyone who has posted any information as I too am planning to visit many Holocaust memorial sites next year when I travel across Europe.

I have nothing practical to add as I have yet to visit these sites but there are a couple of books that are proving invaluable to me. They are 'Holocaust Journey: Travelling in Search of the Past' by Martin Gilbert and 'Concentration Camps: a travellers guide to WW2 sites'. The first is a story about the route taken by history students visiting Holocaust sites and the second book is more of a practical guide to where everything is and what is left there to see. Might be useful if you don't have enough info from the ever useful internet!

Thanks to everyone for the information. It sounds like the best idea would be to go without a tour group then take guided tours of the areas I want to see. Thanks again for all the ideas. I don't know how people traveled before Fodors.

I am not so sure how much an informed guide would help. In most of the important sites in Poland there is little there to see unless you came with some knowledge. One of your respondents mentioned Gilbert's "Holocaust Journey(s?. It is excellent. If I have only five to eight days to visit Poland and some Holocaust sites, then I would skip Auschwitz-Birkenau. I know this sounds heretical, but one can no longer walk the grounds without being in a tightly controlled tour environment. Auschwitz I is a rather disgusting Holocaust-lite event filled with people stamping their life-list book---been there,done that. Access to the huge gas chamber-sermatoria complexes at Birkenau is apparently again extremely limited. The camp curators seem to go back and forth on this. I would fly to Warsaw and use day 1 resting and checking out Polish girls. They are beautiful. Then, it is relatively easy to find to a group tour arrangement to visit Treblinka forty-five (million) miles north of Warsaw. Treblinka is beautifully memorialized but be sure to walk the mile or so to the original slave labor camp whose inmates built the death camps. There is still semi-open mass grave sites in the area, document them, but watch your feet. Day 3, take the train to Lublin, stay in the Orbis hotel, Unia, then have them arrange for a cab driver to pick you up at the hotel, take you to Majdanek in the suburbs and return to pick you up about three hours later. That would day 4 for me. Majdanek is the best preserved of the six death camps in Poland, although it was not an Operation Reinhardt camp (aka a pure "death camp") actually the second largest, after Auschwitz-Birkenau, slave labor facility in human history.
There are both carbon monoxide and hydrogen cynadine gas facilities, as well as a crematoria complex with human ashes remains in them. Behind the major gassing facilities are the tank ditches where 20,000 plus Jews were shot during the so-called "harvest fest" (See Browning's "Ordinary Men.") When you return to the hotel, you will need to drink heavily, but before you do, have someone take you to Globonik's headquarters behind the hotel parking lot. Swear to your heart's content. Now, if you aren't ready to kill yourself, preplan by having contacted a group called "Our Roots" in Warsaw. Have a guide from their organization pick you up on day six and drive you to Sobibor death camp. A few months ago I would have recommended Belzec, but there is a new memorial there. With all honor to the creators of the new memorial, their creation renders Sobibor the most lonely and haunted place on the freaking planet. I strongly recommend "Our Roots" as do others on the web. Ask for 'George' for a driver. Sobibor alone will trouble your sleep forever. If you have any questions, please contact me. I am an academic working on a guidebook to use to visit Holocaust sites. Good luck and see pictures!

Wow, that was an incredibly detailed suggested trip! I'm very impressed. I have been fascinated by the subject of Nazi Germany for years; this was fuelled when I did A level History a fair few years ago now. I have seen numerous WW2 memorials and cemeteries but have yet to make it to any of the more substantial sites (despite living in Germany when I was doing my A levels!). I'm grateful for the infomration and may come back to you if I have any queries as I'm planning on spending a lot of time in Poland and Germany on my travels next year. All the best with the book, that'll be another one to add to the collection! Thanx again.

"Hitler's Death Camps: The Sanity of Madness by Konnilyn Feig" is an excellent book that combines top notch history of the camps with information on their post-war states. A great overview of the Holocaust and the system behind it is "Destruction of the European Jews" by Raul Hilberg. Personally, I think I could only get something out of a tour of a camp if led by a survivor or a historian of the period. Other than that, I would think the experience would be enhanced by reading ahead and doing it solo because it is possible to comtemplate and reflect without rushing around with a group.

We were in Auschwitz-Birkenau in June on my birthday. There are guided tours. Tomboy and lindal have described the experience. It is a somber place as one strolls along paths between barracks and into the buildings for the exhibits. You will find old enlarged photos of prisoners on the walls, and various collections behind glass of mounds of shoes, eye glasses, suitcases, hair and such of executed prisoners. Also there is the wall for executions...just a single shot in the back of the head, no firing squad. And then the gas chambers and crematoria...

Yes, reading up before and after about the whole policy of annihalation of Jews and others is important. I bought a just published little book (157 pp) at Auschwitz museum called "Auschwitz" by Sybille Steinbacher. Am now reading speeches and essays by Vaclav Havel, former Czech president, "The Art of the Impossible," some sober reflections about how human beings could do such unspeakable things.

I can't concieve of touring Holcaust sights. One is sufficient. But everyone might see at least one. We also spent time in Kazirmiez (now part of Krakow) where many Jews once lived, eating in a restaurant where Schindler would meet his family and where Spielberg relaxed, visiting old cemeteries, synagogues, the Schindler factory one day to be developed.

Ozarksbill