syclark

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!!!

tomboy

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).

elaine

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.

aeiger

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.

GSteed

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.

elaine

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

elaine

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.

LindaL

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.

RufusTFirefly

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/

LindaW

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.

GSteed

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.

Mucky

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

trip2006

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.

Mucky

Thanks trip !!

Muck

Art_Vandelay

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.

elaine

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.

Fustigator

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.

USNR

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.

RufusTFirefly

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.

RufusTFirefly

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