Saturday, April 21, 2018

The Holocaust Sites of Europe: An Historical Guide Paperback by Martin Winstone (I.B.Tauris)



I took this book with me on a recent (May 2017) trip to Poland. My main interest was visiting Holocaust sites, and this book was invaluable. It covers all the major camps (Auschwitz, Treblinka, Belzec, Sobibor, Majdanek) as well as many lesser known ones such as Chelmno, Trawniki, and Izbica. In addition to the camps, it covers many of the cities that were important Jewish population centers: Warsaw, Krakow, Lodz, Lublin, Zamosc, among others.

For each site the author discusses the history of the place, what happened there, travel information (i.e. how to get there, hours, website), and what to see when there. He includes a level of detail that would be hard to find elsewhere. For example, in the city of Lublin I was able to find the building, now a school, where the administration of the Holocaust in Poland took place, the building where the railroad offices where (from where bureaucrats arranged to send a couple million people to death camps), and even found out that my hotel had been the headquarters of the German civil administration. This is in addition to the major pre-war Jewish sites. I found a similar level of detail in the many other places that I visited. Since many of the Holocaust related places in Poland have little or no posted information, this book became my "tour guide."

I have not found any other in-print book that focuses on travel to Holocaust sites. So for anyone interested in this, this book is definitely worth getting.

My only complaint is that the book could have used more maps. For many places directions are given through text, where a map would have been much more useful.


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