Dem
47
GOP
53
Here is the question we put before readers last week:
N.M.D. in Duluth, MN, asks: What are some good places to visit in Europe that have historical connections to World War II and the Holocaust?
And here some of the answers we got in response:
C.S. in Philadelphia, PA: My wife and I traveled to Italy in 2018. The Florence American Cemetery is stunning. Tourist sites in Italy are focused around ancient Rome or the Renaissance, coupled with that nation being the forgotten front of World War II. Seeing the rows of crosses and stars, many unknowns, was a moving experience. The Italian staff member we met was committed to preserving the memory and history of those killed. Also interesting was the number of Japanese-American servicemen buried there.
The Stumbling Stones in Rome and Venice, often in the city's Jewish ghettos (yes, they are still called ghettos) give names of the victims who lived in that building. They are small, but individualized memorials to those murdered.
S.W. in New York City, NY: While traveling in western, central and eastern Europe and visiting many camps, ghettos and Holocaust sites, the place that impacted me the most was a visit to my ancestral community of Kaunas (Kovno), Lithuania. I flew to Vilna and took a car service to Kaunas, about 90 minutes away, where I stayed for a couple of days. I hired a guide who was one of the few Jews remaining in the city and we walked the entire city viewing various sites that were originally Jewish schools, synagogues, hospitals, etc., and finally the German Army-created ghettos for the Jewish residents and the Ninth Fort, where massive extermination of the city's Jews took place in short order.
The German Army, which had already conquered neighboring Poland in 1939, entered Lithuania early in the war (Operation Barbarossa in June 1941)) and began its outright extermination of the Jews within 72 hours of arrival. It's a sobering and somber journey to witness this destruction.
A visit to neighboring Vilna is just as emotional. Vilna, which Napoleon called the "Jerusalem of the North," with its vast history of Jewish life and historical/biblical documents, became a major extermination site at Ponary (Paneriai) Forest just outside of the city.
I would advise anyone taking a historical journey like this to spend time reading numerous survivor-written books about the destruction of the Lithuanian Jewish communities before taking the trip.
J.B. in San Bruno, CA: On my bucket list of World War II sites to visit is the town of Oradour-sur-Glane in central France. France has left the remains of the massacred village as is for the past 81 years as a reminder to forthcoming generations.
M.L. in Simpsonville, SC: If you're visiting Normandy for the D-Day beaches (and don't forget Juno, since the Juno Beach Centre is superlative and well worth a visit even if you are not Canadian), I find it interesting to go and follow through to the end of the battle of Normandy at the Falaise Gap. There is a Tiger tank forming a memorial at Vimoutiers, which is of note, and the excellent Polish museum at Mont Ormel is also worth your time.
Also, if you're doing the Falaise Gap, you can visit William the Conqueror's castle at Falaise, which is super cool. It's not World War II, but it's just so much fun, it's worth a stop.
Finally, I would wholeheartedly recommend visiting Dieppe in northern Normandy. It's worth it. The tragic history of the disastrous raid becomes so clear when standing on the beach looking up at the cliffs of Pourville or Puys. For Americans, this is your history, too, but it's often overlooked—the U.S. Army Rangers had their first combat in the European Theatre as part of this raid on August 19, 1942. This is largely remembered as a Canadian loss, and with reason.
About 15 years ago there was a Bell Canada commercial that featured Dieppe. This raid is one of those bits of history that really separates Canadians and Americans on a cultural level. Here is a link in case you're interested. And here is a one-minute overview of the battle from the Canadian POV, courtesy of Historica.
Canadian historian Terry Copp's work was essential reading on my Normandy travels. Here is his guidebook.
I had the amazing luck some years ago of being able to work with Canadian historians, helping to deliver professional development to history teachers on the ground in northern France and in Normandy. It was the best summer job I ever had.
R.R. in Pasadena, CA: People should visit the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam. They have made a quite good museum out of the warehouse that Frank and her compatriots hid in, and it really gives you a sense of what they went through living in there for more than a year, having to stay hidden and quiet all day, lest some warehouse worker hear a sound and become suspicious.
It's such a small space that it's hard to imagine eight people existing in there together for so long, and the reason why they did that, and the fact that seven of them were eventually murdered by the Nazis, gnaws on you the entire time you're walking around. The fear that drove them all into that circumstance, and the fact that it was basically futile in the end, is a quiet exclamation of what the Nazis really did to people, and what authoritarians generally do... the parallels to immigrants in America now hiding from ICE raids is very apt.
D.G. in Valley Village, CA: The Ten Boom family watch shop, the story of which was put on the silver screen in a movie known as The Hiding Place. It is a small shop in Haarlem, The Netherlands, where the Ten Boom family (who ran a watch repair business) lived and worked. Sincere and evangelical (the meaning before the term was politicized), the family hid Jews during the War, constructing a false wall in a closet to hide behind. Eventually raided, the Ten Booms were arrested, but the Jews they were hosting all were saved in their hiding places. The elderly patriarch of the family died in Nazi custody, while the two spinster sisters were sent to Auschwitz and were released due to a bureaucratic error after months of laboring.
There are scheduled tours, I believe, in the afternoon. The Ten Booms have long since passed but volunteers lead the tour. I am an atheist, but I willingly tolerated the mild proselytizing by these volunteers and even viewed it as an insight into their motivations. When I went, I believe they took only donations (no fees). It's a 10 minute thing and if you are in Haarlem for the Groit Kirk or the art you might wish to stop in.
R.L. in Alameda, CA: Good places to visit in Europe that have historical connections to World War II and the Holocaust are... anywhere in Poland. I just returned from an Ancestral Journey throughout eastern Poland (part of the former Pale of Settlement) with a group of 18 American Ashkenazi Jews. Poland was squeezed between (and occupied by) two of the major powers in the war, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. Non-Jewish Poles suffered the war and the Holocaust right alongside their Jewish neighbors. Not-so-fun fact: An estimated 12 million souls were murdered by the Nazis, double the 6 million that the American and Israeli Jewish community reminds the world of. Among those numbers were 3 million non-Jewish Poles who perished in labor, concentration and death camps. To this day, non-Jewish Poles feel the pain of the Holocaust just like we American Jews do.
Every place we visited, from the largest cities (Kraków, Lublin, Warsaw) to the smallest villages (that you've never heard of, some with a mere 1,000 residents today) has a monument to those who fought in or were victims of the war. Some have a single monument for all who perished. Some have separate monuments for Jewish victims (erected after the fall of the communist government) next to the brutalist Communist-era monument that ignored them. Many villages have small museums to commemorate their history, often run by volunteer "memory keepers," non-Jewish Poles who have dedicated themselves to restoring the memory of what their villages looked like before the Nazis hauled away and murdered half of the residents. You can't go anywhere in Poland and not be reminded of the war.
While in Warsaw, you can easily find where the ghetto walls were. There are markers and monuments throughout that part of the city. You can visit the POLIN Museum of the History of Polish Jews, which covers 1,000 years of Jewish history in the region (at the turn of the 20th century, it is estimated that 80% of the world's Jews lived there). It includes an extensive section on World War II and the Holocaust. The Jewish Historical Institute, also in Warsaw, contains archives that were collected and hidden by the people confined within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto. There is an extensive archive/museum in Lublin at the Grodzka Gate—NN Theatre Centre.
The Nazis built all of their concentration and death camps on Polish soil (labor camps, too, but there were some of these in Germany as well). We visited Plaszow outside of Kraków, Majdanek outside of Lublin and Treblinka an hour or so east of Warsaw. Each has a different take based on how the camp was used and what remained after the Nazis attempted to cover up their crimes. There are so many others (Auschwitz, Sobibor and Belzec, to name a few). I don't recommend visiting all of them. The human psyche can only handle so much darkness.
Many cities and villages have synagogues that survived the war (largely masonry structures that were useful as, say, a stable or storage facility). A few in the larger cities have been restored and are in use today. Some have been restored but are in small villages where there are no Jews to use them. So, memory keepers have turned them into museums or community centers. In Sejny, near the Lithuanian border, the synagogue serves as a venue for the Klezmer Orchestra of the Sejny Theatre.
Many cities and villages have delineated and restored (as much as possible) the Jewish cemeteries. The German army desecrated them, removing the tombstones (matzevot in Hebrew) and using them as pavers for the new roads they built to their death camps. The roads are gone now and the matzevot distributed to the winds. As these are discovered (often in people's gardens or as part of the foundation of building), memory keepers collect them and return them to the cemeteries. There is no way of knowing where the bodies were interred, so they are often collected in a central location within the cemetery boundaries. Some Jewish cemeteries remain intact, including the Okopowa Cemetery in Warsaw and this one in Tarnow.
These are just the places that my group visited during our 2 weeks together. I should mention the Taube Center for Jewish Life & Learning, based in Warsaw. They organized our tour and are a great resource, even if you are traveling alone.
Incidentally, if you are an Ashkenazi Jew and an organized tour like the one I just returned from interests you, get in touch with me privately through (V) or (Z).
L.S.-H. in Naarden. The Netherlands: Recently I was in Kraków for a conference and had the opportunity to do a couple of tours beforehand. One was a guided tour of Auschwitz and Birkenau, which I think is a good place to start. Our highly trained guide was extremely knowledgeable and patiently answered tons of questions about the buildup to war and incarceration, all facets of "life" there, and the aftermath. It was 7 hours from start to finish but, of course, was well worth it.
Another must-see tour was of Kraków's Jewish Quarter and former ghetto. It's a lot of walking, but the excellent guide from Kraków Explorers takes you along (in a personal way, as if you were there at that time and place) through the history of Jewish life in Kraków—from before the war to the former Jewish ghetto to the survivors and remembrance after the war.
M.P. in Scotts Valley, CA: Birkenau.
As an engineer, I was impressed with the clarity and efficiency of the layout and operations.
As a person, I walked around in a cold sweat for the entire duration.
The utter inhumanity. The inherent horror in that place. What those poor souls went through.
I take small souvenirs, like a stone, when I travel, but I wanted nothing, nothing from that place.
"Never Again" rings so hollow as Israel, under Netanyahu, is gleefully building what they promised to prevent for all time.
Irony is a cruel mistress.
R.E.M. in Brooklyn, NY: Auschwitz. This is a physical manifestation of the Holocaust, and the most powerful and horrible thing I have ever seen. You walk the streets, go through the buildings, see the pond full of human ashes. In the museum, there are huge display cases, each one with a collection stolen from the victims: suitcases, eyeglasses, shoes, prostheses, etc. The tangible feeling of "Yes, This Is Real" will stay with you forever.
M.T. in Linköping, Sweden: One of the most sobering World War II-related places you can visit in Europe is Bełżec, a small village in southeastern Poland.
I passed through Bełżec last fall, traveling overland from Sweden to Ukraine. My stop in Ukraine was brief—a quick handover of a small donation to the Ukrainian military—but the route itself offered unexpected moments of reflection.
At first glance, there's nothing remarkable about it. It's an ordinary European village: two rows of houses along a country road, a school, a small library, surrounded by fields, groves, and woods. A railway line cuts across the street.
Villages like this exist all over Europe. That's exactly what makes Bełżec so haunting.
It was the railway that made the Nazis choose this spot. In 1942, Bełżec became one of their key extermination camps. In just a few months, approximately 500,000 people—primarily Polish and Ukrainian Jews—were murdered here. Only Auschwitz and Treblinka saw more deaths.
And yet, few people have ever heard of Bełżec. That's because there were just a handful of survivors. After the war, there were no witnesses left to tell the world what had happened there.
This is why Bełżec is such a powerful place to visit. It reminds us that unimaginable cruelty doesn't require a dramatic setting. It can unfold in the most unremarkable of places—quiet towns and peaceful countryside. Places that look, in many ways, just like our own.
This is a place worth visiting—not for its tourist appeal, but because Bełżec challenges us to remember what can happen when democracy breaks down, when extremism flourishes, and when ordinary people look the other way.
In the end, that's the most important lesson places like Bełżec teach us: The greatest atrocities of history didn't happen in distant lands or on alien soil. They happened in villages and towns that look very much like ours. And that means the responsibility to resist hate belongs to all of us.
H.S. In Lake Forest, CA: I have been to a number of sites across Europe, including the obvious major concentration camps (incidentally, my brother serves as a tour guide of Auschwitz and the Schindler factory), but I want to highlight a lesser-known but deeply moving site to visit: the Hadamar Memorial in Germany, which was one of the centers of the Aktion T4 program, the Nazi regime's campaign of involuntary euthanasia targeting people with mental and physical disabilities. I first visited this site as a high school student in Germany, and very recently took my family, including my two teenage children. The museum and memorial there offer a powerful and disturbing insight into how medicalized killing was justified, planned, and carried out, even before the Holocaust escalated. The exhibit also traces the pre-Nazi roots of eugenic thinking, making clear that these atrocities didn't begin in 1933.
What's especially haunting is how ordinary professionals like doctors, nurses and bureaucrats participated, using language and logic disturbingly similar to more recent political rhetoric aimed at dehumanizing vulnerable populations, such as that used by the Trump administration in its treatment of immigrants. The memorial also honors those who resisted, most notably Bishop Clemens August Graf von Galen, whose brave sermons denouncing the killings helped spark public outcry and temporarily halt the program.
J.B. in London, England, UK: The Holocaust memorial in Berlin. It needs no description, but simply shows that the German nation as a whole understands what it did and how much it regrets that.
M.W. in Richmond, VA: The Kongresshalle (Congress Hall) in Nürnberg (Nuremberg), Germany, is the largest preserved Nazi rally grounds. Although it was never finished, it was intended as a congress center for the Nazi Party with a self-supporting roof. Standing in the weedy floor of this massive structure, which would have held 50,000 people, and built for the purpose of holding Nazi rallies, is a chilling experience as the visitor imagines what it would have been like to have seen 50,000 Nazis being exhorted into a frenzy of hatred and violence.
R.S. in Bedford, England, UK: My immediate reaction to the question was Sachsenhausen, near Berlin. This is where the Nazis tried out their first attempts at "the Final Solution" and realised that further development was needed to deal with the numbers involved. It is close to Berlin and you can join a walking tour, as well as having time on your own there.
N.E.C. in Fairfax, VA: When you travel through Eastern Europe, the landscapes carry whispers of the Second World War and the Holocaust. Every city, every scarred wall, and every quiet memorial bears witness to the darkest chapter of the twentieth century. On my journey last year, I set out to experience those places where history still lingers, where memory has been carefully preserved, and where the past presses close upon the present. These sites particularly intrigued me, not only for their historical value but also their relationship to what is going on in the U.S. today.
No city embodies the weight of that history more than Berlin. The German capital, once the heart of the Nazi regime, is now a living museum of remembrance. Walking through its streets, one can find reminders of both destruction and survival, of both terror and resilience.
The first stop was the site of Hitler's bunker. Today it is nothing more than a grassy field, marked by a modest memorial plaque. There are no grand structures, no theatrical ruins—just a quiet, understated acknowledgment of where the dictator met his end in 1945. Its plainness feels deliberate, ensuring that the place does not become a shrine, but remains a sober reminder of the collapse of tyranny.
Nearby, many of Berlin's central buildings still bear bullet holes and shrapnel scars from the brutal Battle of Berlin. To run one's hand along the pocked stone is to feel the tangible evidence of urban warfare and the desperate struggle that raged in the war's final days. These marks are left unpolished, reminders that history cannot and should not be fully erased.
The Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, however, leaves perhaps the most haunting impression. Covering a vast field near the Brandenburg Gate, it consists of over 2,700 concrete stelae, arranged in rows that rise and fall unevenly. As you wander through the gray corridors, the noise of the city vanishes, and the world narrows to shadow, stone, and silence. The memorial has no single explanation—it is meant to unsettle, to evoke the void left by millions of silenced lives.
Scattered throughout Berlin's neighborhoods are the Stolpersteine, or "stumbling stones." These brass-plated cobblestones are set into sidewalks outside former homes of Jewish families and other victims of Nazi persecution. Each bears a name, date of deportation, and fate. Pausing at them in front of ordinary apartment buildings makes the Holocaust personal—it was not just an event in camps far away, but something that began at the doorsteps of regular homes.
Berlin also houses two former concentration camps within reach: Sachsenhausen to the north, which served as a model camp and administrative center for the SS, and Ravensbrück, a camp primarily for women. To walk through their grounds is to confront the machinery of imprisonment, forced labor, and death. These sites are stark and chilling, yet essential for understanding the reality of Nazi terror.
For a more structured historical account, the Topography of Terror exhibition provides a chronological journey through the rise and fall of the Third Reich. Built on the site of the former SS and Gestapo headquarters, it combines photographs, documents, and personal stories with the very ground where the architects of oppression once stood. Few museums manage to show so clearly how an ideology turned into a system of brutality.
Not far away lies the Book Burning Memorial at Bebelplatz. Here, a glass window set into the pavement reveals empty underground bookshelves—symbolizing the thousands of works destroyed by Nazi students in May 1933. Looking down into that hollow chamber, one feels the cultural violence that paralleled the regime's physical violence, the attempt to erase knowledge and voices deemed "un-German."
Leaving Berlin behind, I traveled into the Czech Republic, to Terezín (Theresienstadt). Unlike Auschwitz or Dachau, Terezín was presented by the Nazis as a "model ghetto." In 1944, they staged it for Red Cross inspectors, with cafés, flower boxes, and art exhibitions designed to create a façade of humane treatment. Yet behind that mask, Terezín was a transit camp, where tens of thousands were sent eastward to extermination centers. Walking through its barracks and courtyards today, one can sense both the ingenuity of the prisoners who created music, art, and culture under oppression, and the cruel deception of those who exploited their creativity for propaganda. It is a place of paradox—beauty created under coercion, suffering hidden behind painted walls.
Prague, too, carries traces of Jewish life before and after the war. Remarkably, several historic synagogues and the Old Jewish Cemetery survived the Nazi occupation. The Old-New Synagogue, Europe's oldest still-functioning synagogue, and the Pinkas Synagogue, now a memorial inscribed with the names of nearly 80,000 Czech victims of the Holocaust, both anchor the Jewish Quarter. Standing in these sacred spaces, one feels the endurance of a culture that the Nazis sought to extinguish. The survival of Prague's synagogues is sometimes explained by Hitler's macabre wish to preserve the city as a "museum of an extinct race." Today, they instead testify to resilience, continuity, and memory reclaimed.
Traveling through these places—Berlin, Terezín, and Prague—was not easy. At times it felt overwhelming, standing where such cruelty unfolded. But visiting them was necessary. Each site offers a different perspective: the ruins of power in Berlin, the deceit of propaganda in Terezín, the survival of faith in Prague. Together, they remind us that history is not abstract. It is written into the stones of cities, the silence of memorials, and the names engraved in brass and marble.
To journey through Eastern Europe is to encounter the Holocaust not as distant history, but as something present and pressing—a call to remember, and above all, to resist forgetting.
J.A. in Tunis, Tunisia: Outside of paying respects at concentration camps, the 'Shoes on the Danube Bank' in Budapest remains the most haunting of the various Holocaust memorials I've visited.
Budapest has other reminders, as well as memorials to the later victims of Communism, and is a remarkable city to visit for many reasons.
S.E.Z. in New Haven, CT: We went on a kosher tour of Vienna, Budapest, and Prague in 2012.
The three holocaust memorials that I still remember most due to the strong impressions they made on me were:
- The Shoes on the Danube Promenade in Budapest: Our tour guide said that for a while it was called the Red Danube instead of the Blue Danube. Simple. Factual & meaningful. The plaques in English, Hebrew, and a local language make it clear that all the Nazis needed to do was give permission to the local townspeople of Budapest and then stand back and watch.
- The Great Synagogue of Pilsen, Czech Republic: The Czech national government maintains the building as a museum. To think that a building of this magnitude was needed in one of so many cities in Europe, but the 50 Jewish families who lived in Pilsen in 2012 used a small space a few blocks away.
- Sopron, Hungary: A small town we passed through between the cities we were there to visit had a memorial that truly amazed me. If you don't know Hebrew, you will need a tour guide who can explain all the symbolism packed into this small monument. Every time I revisit the photos I took there, the tears are hard to hold back (and we Vulcan aerospace engineers do not normally cry easily).
M.S. in Newton, MA: As a Member of the Tribe, and the grandchild of two Holocaust survivors, I am going to avoid the obvious like Auschwitz or other major camps, and go in a different direction:
- Prague: The way my tour guides explained it, Hitler thought Prague was so beautiful, that he basically left it untouched and never bombed it. I believe the area they call "New Town" was actually built around 700 years ago. The Jewish quarter and synagogues are mostly intact, the old Jewish cemetery survived as well. Prague would show someone what Jewish life was truly like before the Holocaust. Unfortunately, most Jews have left Prague, the architecture is stunning, and the Jewish tour guides do a spectacular job.
- Terezín (also in Czech Republic): It was a "way station" that the Nazis used before sending people to the death camps. It's an amazing place to visit and can be done in conjunction with a Prague trip. The Nazis also used it for PR for organizations like the Red Cross, so it has areas that appear to be luxurious, to show that they weren't mistreating the victims of the Holocaust.
- Ioannina, Greece: Almost all of the Jews were rounded up during the war and murdered at Auschwitz. There is a small, surviving Jewish community, and a beautiful ancient synagogue with Torah scrolls between 300-600 years old. It is a model of what a small European city was like for Jews in the 1940s. The synagogue is only used a few times a year, but touring the Jewish areas is a really special experience.
J.B. in Bozeman, MT: Although Spain was technically neutral in the Second World War, if you visit Madrid. I suggest seeing Picasso's bleak but beautiful 1937 painting "Guernica," depicting the destruction of a small Basque village by the Axis powers. Something of a practice run for Poland 1939.
I have seen it in person, and it is jaw dropping. It takes up the whole wall and I feel it captures the horror to come in a few years to the whole world.
C.S. in Newport, Wales, UK: Anywhere with a Stolperstein.
These are ten-centimeter concrete cubes bearing a brass plate inscribed with the name and life dates of victims of Nazi extermination or persecution. Stolpersteine are placed right into the pavement, usually where the victim last lived. They are now more than 100,000 of them, spread across about 1,000 cities, towns and villages, so you should be able to find some pretty much wherever you go in Europe.
Here is the question for next week:
M.C. in Glasgow, Scotland, UK, asks: Democratic administrations have a track record of being relatively good for the economy and for government debt. Even much of the compassionate welfare spending and healthcare reform turns out to provide excellent value for money: That investment in "human capital" results in productive tax-paying workers in the long term.
So, why are wealthy capitalists so pro-Republican?
Submit your answers to comments@electoral-vote.com, preferably with subject line "Baby You're a Rich Man"!