My photos of the Kindertransport statues are copyright. The ones in Wikipedia are free - check their photos and permission.
Problem
Kate and William visited Stutthof near Gdansk in Poland, then flew to Berlin where they saw the Berlin Holocaust memorial and a camp. Yes, but they took a plane between them.
Their visit has encouraged others to follow in their footsteps to Holocaust museums and camps and memorials. Where are the Holocaust museums, concentration camps and memorials and which could you see on a visit to Berlin, Germany, Poland or another country? A Tripadvisor reader asked which ones were within reach of a stay centred on Berlin.
Why visit more than one? If you are not trying to trace an ancestor's route, why would you impose that sadness on yourself, whether on a business trip or a holiday?
The knowledge that it is there dominates other thoughts in your mind. It's like looking at road accidents. You are mesmerised by the horror. Feel that by witnessing, although you cannot help anybody who is dead, you can somehow prevent future tragedies to yourself and others by learning lessons and warning other people how to watch out for danger. You feel that it would be disrespectful to ignore it and just party.
A visit to Auschwitz is very harrowing. I had put off visiting Poland for years and when I reached Poland I found visiting Auschwitz was unavoidable. The Poles want people to know that although it was on Polish soil it was organised by the German Nazi party. Every Polish school takes children there. The concentration camp is on most tours from Krakow, either as the main feature of the tour or part of a combined tour to other locations such as a salt mine, and Auschwitz was just as bad as I feared.
Answer to tour planning problem - lists
GERMANY
Berlin has the Berlin Wall museum on general tours but you may want to spend time at:
Berlin - Holocaust museum, the one with the concrete block maze outside.
Munich - Dachau camp.
POLAND
Krakow, former capital. Beautiful small city with a preserved square and medieval cathedral. Preserved because it was just across the border from Germany and the Germans invaded and quickly captured the small city by surprise and made it their Nazi HQ. Jews were sent on trains from German and all over Europe to Auschwitz outside the city.
1 Auschwitz
This is where Anne Frank and her sister and mother were sent. Elderly and children were gassed, the useful able bodied adults who survived selection set to work. Learn that the able bodied prisoners had tattooed numbers because after three months they had aged and thinned so much that you could not recognize them from photos taken on arrival.
2 Birkenau
You can do both on a combined tour. Although it is possible to visit Auschwitz without Birkenau, the main day tour takes you to both. As people selling tours tell you, it is essential to see both to understand. The shock is that it goes on for miles. Field after field, each separated from the next by barbed wire and huge, high watch towers, with a different field for each country and language group. This field of hangars with bunk beds for the French; this field for the Germans; this field for the Poles; this field for the Greeks and so on; and on; and on.
3 Schindler's Factory
Finish with a story which had a happy end for many, a museum in the former factory of Schindler, with videos of survivors saying 'what he did for me'.
Liberated by Russians.
Warsaw
The large capital to tour. Many tours will first pass the Chopin monument, then the Jewish Ghetto and / or the outside of the Jewish Museum. Many other tours go inside both the Warsaw war museum and the Jewish Museum. (I asked for another private tour going to the Ghetto, the Synagogue and the Orphanage.)
Jewish Museum.
WWII Orphanage. Statue outside (ask a driver on a private tour to stop) and exhibition inside the orphanage. (Tours by appointment because the place is in use and not enough visitors or guides to run a tour except on demand.) Heroic head was offered the chance to be rescued by the resistance, but chose to accompany the little children on the train to Auschwitcz where he and they died.
(Jewish cemetery has WWII memorial. Interesting, but not a major attraction.)
(Synagogue.)
Czech Republic
Prague. Large Jewish Museum and a combined ticket for a group of synagogues and cemeteries.
Terezin camp. The place where the Red Cross were deceived into thinking all was well, as shown in a film. (Prague also has a museum on Franz Kafka. )
Tips
Belsen. Back in Germany - where the retreating Germans took the Auschwicz survivors on a forced march. Then they died of mal treatment or mal nourishment, although Red Cross food was stockpiled outside. Anne Frank and her sister died here.
On a tour through Germany we unexpectedly drove past the sign to Belsen but had no time to stop because we had a route with hotels and meetings arranged and had not looked at the map and seen that we were passing Belsen. Liberated by Americans.
Dachau
I went to Dachau near Munich first. We started with the jollier tourist sites marked on maps. We had photographed the fairytale castle of Neuschwanstein immortalised by Disney, spent a jolly evening in the wine district. Then before leaving the area, took a sobering look at Dachau.
I remember staring at the map of all the train routes to Auschwicz. The texts and human guides seemed to think it was very important. I wondering why a map of train routes was such a prominent feature. I was more interested in finding out about people than looking at maps. The grim stories of what life was like and how people died, and the glad news of the liberation of the camp and the survivors. Also the physical evidence, the photos and written records, human witnesses of the liberation - proving that the holocaust took place.
UK
Jewish Museum in London. Kindertransport statue on Liverpool Street station. Memorial to Anne Frank in a central London Park.
Other Jewish museums and Holocaust memorial centres in other cities.
In London, England, it seemed absurd that anybody would doubt the holocaust. Later my mother told me that post-war the cinemas had shown news reels.
My mother, who lost her first husband in WWII at El Alamein, had lost nobody in the holocaust. But she sympathised and chatted to everybody in shops in Edgware and Hendon and Golders Green. I remember her diverting to a shop to buy stockings, even though they were more expensive, because she felt sorry for the woman serving and wanted to give her a sale and talk and listen to her. The assistant would enquire after our family. Then when mother enquired after the woman's family. She would respond happily about one relative in England. Then she would look sad and say of another relative add, "I had a ... but. "
Years later I met two people at my Writing Group. One elderly woman with a German accent came to the UK just before WWII. She said of her mother, "She wrote to me in 194.* but I never heard from her again." (*I forget the exact date.)
My travel agent had a family photo. Her cousin survived WWII, as an unborn baby. When there was a roundup in a block of flats, the people upstairs knocked on the front door and said, "Your pregnant daughter, quick, come up to our flat." The travel agent's cousin was the unborn baby whose mother was saved. My travel agent said to me, "You see, there are good people."
Tips
Check out websites for (alphabetical order):
Auschwicz
Belsen
Berlin
Birkenau
Jewish Museum, London
Kindertransport
Krakow
Munich
Schindler's factory
Schindler
TripAdvisor forum on camps within reach of Berlin
Wiki article on list of concentration camps
Yad Vashem website (Documentation of those lost in the Holocaust, stories from survivors and tributes to the Righteous Gentiles who saved Jews, such as Schindler.)
Author
Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. I have several more posts about destinations in German, and Poland, and England, holocaust memorials and synagogues and WWII worldwide. Please share links to your favourite posts.
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