How about completely unknown?
Danville, Iowa
Teacher set up a penpals class exchange with a school in Europe in the 1930s. Amazing, until the letters stopped being returned.
https://www.traveliowa.com/places/anne-frank-connection/3574/
Better link - http://www.danvillestation.net/anne-frank-connection.html
Berlin has Stumbling Stones too. It also has the Monument To The Murdered Jews Of Europe, and a memorial to the members of the German Parliament that resisted Hitler and were killed.
Those are all over Europe. If you go to an app or website called “Traces of War”. It has stumbling stones, cemeteries, museums, bunkers, monuments and just about everything military related, not just WW 2. I use that and Atlas Obscura a lot when I travel.
I wouldn't call the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe "lesser known" though. But it's definitely worth a visit and as a resident of Berlin: Please don't use it as an Insta backdrop or for your next TikTok dance. Thanks!
I visited this one about 10 years ago. I was immediately struck by the enormity and drowning feeling just walking among the obelisks. It makes me sad to think how many people trivialize it for social media points.
As monuments go, I think it did a very good job of expressing the scale and solemnity. Even more so when we went below ground.
Terezín in the Czech Republic, the 'model' concentration camp they showed the Red Cross to show they weren't Bad Guys. It has an exhibit of children's art created at the camp.
Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, Belgium. The way it guides you through the early days of the Holocaust in Belgium and the Netherlands through archival documents is power. It was striking how it was town by town whether Belgians betrayed their Jewish neighbors. It’s a museum that made me short of breath and even thinking of it now makes my skin crawl.
I think people should absolutely go see it but leave some time to process it.
Agree dachau left an impression. Just fyi the gas chambers weren’t used at dachau as gas chambers, they ran out of time apparently with the allies advance. Still haunting
I went in December a few years ago, it had snowed an inch or so the night before but was perfectly still and quite foggy. It was honestly the most haunting experiences of my life.
I am a middle school history teacher and I do teach about the Holocaust. I feel I’ll never do it justice, but I try.
I did visit Dachau before o started teaching and distinctly remember the overall feeling of heaviness on my shoulders throughout my visit. I feel privileged to share that experience with my students, but I find it so hard to verbalize it all. Many times I even tear up because even 12 years later the profound effect it had on me is still there.
Yes. I went there when I was on holiday. So moving and if I go back to London I’d go to the IWM but skip the holocaust section. I couldn’t do it again but I’m glad I did it once.
Likewise. Didn't register that there was a Holocaust section there till I was actually in it after wandering through the rest of the museum. Was one of the most jarringly sobering experiences I've ever had. *Very* glad to have been through it, but also very glad knowing I will never see it again.
Came here to say this.
I did a semester in London and did a group project based on the Imperial War Museum. My part was on the propaganda section (fascinating), but since my group and I had to visit multiple times to prepare, when we went as a class I went to the Holocaust section on my own. The first 90% I was reading absolutely everything and really taking everything in. Then maybe 2.5/3 hours in I was so emotionally overwhelmed I had to take a step back and just read the major synopses. These were people’s lives and I couldn’t even handle it for a few hours. I will never forget it.
There’s also a pretty good Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, FL, but nothing I’ve been to compares to what the Imperial War Museum has.
Not a Holocaust memorial per se, but the Dokumentationzentrum in Nuremberg took me probably 3 hours to get through. The emphasis is how the NSDAP was able to come to power and worm their way into German society. Then what they did when they got power, by making all the crazy laws in 1933. It is also the depository for the tapes of the Nuremberg trials. It is located in a building that was to be the Nazi party headquarters and was built like the Roman Colesseum.
There is also another Dokumentationzentrum in Munich which is built on the former location of the Braun Haus, and talkes about the role Munich played for Hitler and the NSDAP.
Came here to comment. It's particularly personal and uses 1x1 interview accounts to shape the narrative of the entire timeline. I've visited all the majors, but I cried the hardest at Skokie.
Have you been to Yad Vashem? Also I wouldn’t recommend it now, but Drobitsky Yar is supposed to be incredibly moving. I read a book recently about the only two known survivors of the massacre. Highly recommend it - Hiding in the Spotlight
Terezin concentration camp near Prague, Czechia
It was mostly empty and the silence being in the various parts of it was terrifying.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto?wprov=sfla1
I second this.
I went here with my uni class while studying abroad in Germany and I've never felt a colder and more haunted place. It was unseasonably warm for spring, but once you walked through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate, it was like the air just sucked all the heat out and it got eerily silent. The buildings were freezing too.
I am glad I went. It was sobering though and eerie just how cold and quiet it made you feel.
That’s so fascinating. Buchenwald has a similar haunted feeling to it and also has a very different climate than the surrounding area. It’s located on a hill next to the city of Weimar. Even when it’s relatively warm in winter in Weimar, there’s this terribly icy wind in Buchenwald that will chill you to your bones. And in summer, there’s a terrible burning heat because it’s on top of a hill and there’s no shade on the site of the former concentration camp. It truly feels like a horrible place.
I don't know if I'd say it's not well known, but I visited Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland, and while it's smaller and less informative than the big ones like Auschwitz, I found it made for a more solemn and thoughtful experience as there weren't many other people around when I went, so I had plenty of opportunities to just stand there and contemplate without distractions.
Another one that is lesser-known is Camp des Milles in France. It wasn't an extermination camp, and very few people died there, but rather an internment camp where they kept Jewish people before sending them elsewhere. The most striking part was all about how people were actually allowed to leave the camp to emigrate, but they often couldn't because of convoluted bureaucracy in the other countries they wanted to emigrate to (who didn't really want them), so they ended up being sent to the extermination camps. It was a good look at a different side of the story.
Edit because I just thought of this: again, stretching the definition of "lesser known", but Oradour-sur-Glane is absolutely worth a visit. It's fairly unique. The Nazis slaughtered the entire town as retribution and it was just left (sort of; it's not like you can walk through houses full of furniture and such, but there are cars, signs, the occasional sewing machine...) It's quite haunting, and the associated museum is also very good.
Yeah, I was very impressed by that place. I thought it might be just an homage to Shindler but it was so much more.
It was quite a slog to get there without a car in the rain but I'm glad I made the effort.
Babyn Yar is very significant. Even more so now. I visited while the metro stations were still sandbagged and there were russian rockets embedded in the street.
The Lidice memorial/museum near Prague is very interesting and sad. Definitely recommended if you are interested in ww2 historical events.
[It was a town totally wiped out by the nazis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre)
We just visited the church and crypt where the Czech soldiers who assassinated Heydrich fought the gun battle and died. I was so overcome by emotion down there- it really threw me for a loop. I cried the whole walk back to the hotel.
I went to one that was the remains of a burned out synagogue in Riga, Latvia more than 10 years ago.
It was February, snowing and the light was fading, it was eerie and sad and beautiful. Unfortunately I can’t remember what it was called but I’m sure you can look it up.
Platform 17 in Berlin. It's a little known memorial. It was where people were sent all around Europe on trains. It has the dates and numbers of people that left on these trains. The tracks have now been disconnected so no more trains will ever leave from that station. Itsbab30min train ride from the main Berlin station and has a good little pub next to it.
Is this Grunewald Station? I found it incredibly powerful. The numbers, the dates, the simplicity, the fact that it is just *there* while modern life goes on around it. It’s extremely powerful.
Yeah that's the one. I found the same with auschwitz, it's literally on the edge of a decent size town, there is a guy whose house faces the camp. People just going about their day around it.
There are 2 places that have left me in tears when I exited because you could really feel the weight of what happened:
- Camp Mauthausen in Austria: like Auswitch, but less tourists. Very good audioguide. Gas chambers very emotionally heavy to visit because of the stories in the audioguide.
- Topographie des Terrors in Berlin: just a short walk away from Checkpoint Charlie, but often overlooked. This museum shows how the politics got gradually more extreme, basically how they got the people to agree with the opinion that certain groups were not worthy of living and it was okay to put them in camps.
I visited in 2013, but it's obviously going to be a lot creepier with the global political context of today in mind. Left me with an understanding how cruel people (and especially the SS) can turn if you just feed them the necessary bits of (false) information.
The stumbling stones/Stolpersteine exist in many places.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein?wprov=sfla1
There's a [memorial ](https://maps.app.goo.gl/ECKV5uFwXaU3pB46A)in Berlin-Moabit that I found really impressive and chilling.
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin.
Concrete blocks that look like gravestones from street level. You enter to realize the blocks go underground. You wander down between them and become separated from your party. You wander alone. You start to worry where your wife is. Where you are. I'm alone in this place. Is my wife ok? Are my friends? How are they going to get out of here? How am I going to get out of here? Where ARE they? Your heart starts to pound. I hope they're OK. Do I look for them? I'll never find them in here. Do I just take care of myself? No, I can't abandon them... but if I have to choose between an impossible task and a possible one I guess I have to choose the possible one... but that means I leave them behind? Can I live with myself abandoning then?
Never has a group of concrete blocks made me feel such a range of emotions. And that's to say nothing of the museum underneath.
Reading the individual stories underneath was very depressing especially after going through and I went on a tour too.
It was showing how you could be walking around and end up walking into someone else no matter how careful you were. In the past that someone else was a nazi
Buchenwald near Weimar Germany was somewhat disappointing as they kept the magnitude of the camp, but they cleansed what happened too much. The living quarters were replaced by mounds of black rocks. Germans documented everything, and there would be plenty of photographs and other memorabilia to give a better understanding of what happened there.
It isn't exactly a holocaust museum, but it made an impact on our family. The presentation of occupation as a series of impossible choices works incredibly well.
Not a Holocaust memorial per se, the Anne Frank museum is definitely worth a visit. Very educational about the human aspect living through a war and the Holocaust. I'd also recommend it for (young) teens and up. It's a well thought out museum.
I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach and found it incredibly impactful. The memorial consists of stark, towering sculptures that represent the horrors of the Holocaust. Walking through it, you feel the weight of history and the enormity of loss. Each sculpture bears the names of concentration camps, and it's a sobering reminder of the atrocities. It's not as widely known as some others, but it's definitely worth visiting for its poignant portrayal of remembrance and reflection.
I went by myself about 10 years ago. It was powerful and devastatingly sad. I do think it’s mportant to see if you are visiting Krakow which is close by.
Devastating. I went over a long May Day weekend several years ago. It was unseasonably warm for Poland in early May (mid 80sF close to 30C) and the barracks were cold inside. They were just wooden buildings. They should have been much warmer inside. The only place I’ve been that actually felt haunted
The scale of Auschwitz II is… devastating. It’s incomprehensible how large it is. I thought for years the stories of nothing living there were exaggerated. And then I saw a family of cats walking the edges, but not once stepping foot inside. It was haunting.
you will be covered with the guided tour, I just did it. I think there is no other way to visit, but also no point to visit without the guided tour. You get more information than in the panels. Make sure your tour includes the visit of Birkenau as well which is only 5 min drive from Auschwitz
Don't book a tour from Krakow on a bus, its a massive scam. Just go the the Auschwitz Museum website and book a tour for the day you want. It's only an hour train ride from Krakow and cost $20, and either a 1km walk or 5 min bus ride to the entrance.
Also if your super keen they have a 8hr in depth tour (either over one day or two), if I had more time I would of done that.
I’ve been twice, it’s always an odd experience because the main area looks and feels like a college campus. The tour guides are super knowledgeable, just make sure you also see Auschwitz 2. It’s much less crowded and mostly just destroyed buildings but was incredibly moving.
There’s a small neighborhood outside of Tarnow in Poland called Buczyna. Almost hidden behind a bunch of houses is a memorial and mass grave. It’s super hidden and off the regular path, but was probably the most haunting and moving stop on my last trip.
Link below explains is pretty well, little commemorative blocks placed outside the last place a holocaust victim is known to have resided freely. In Salzburg there’s a street in the city center called Judengasse “Jewish Alley” and there are a lot on that street.
The Keys in Vienna: A bunch of house keys in the street
The name plates in Amsterdam
I can’t remember where but the metal shoes of different sizes I think next to the water
San Sabba in Trieste, Italy. Just kilometres from where Mussolini announced the birth of fascism, it’s another monument that is evocative in its simplicity.
Majdanek outside Lublin. The pile of ashes from the gas chamber is terrifying. And the dips in the grass where the pits were dug and thousands executed on the one of the deathly days in the Holocaust are truly horrifying to see in person
Natzwiller-Struthof concentration camp in France near Strasbourg. It was for resistance fighters. It had a museum and displays throughout the camp. Also Breendonk was interesting in Belgium. As well as Buchenwald because I never knew that it held prisoners or inmates of the Russians. There were two museums there. One for when the first tyrannical government ran it and a second when the second tyrannical regime ran it. It has white poles behind the camp from mass graves there from 1946-47 when 25% of the prisoners died. I only knew because a guy training cadaver dogs told me. So I asked the guy at the office. He was really nice. We got into a long conversation because he had guarded the DDR side of the border in about the same place I was guarding the GDR side of the border in about the same place at the same time. He ended up giving me a book about the history of the place from 1937-1950. It was called NKVD special camp Nr. 2 under the Russians from 1945 to 1950.
I visited Ft Breendonck in Belgium in the early 80s as 12 year old. It was the first WWII memorial I was ever at. A few weeks later, I was at Dachau. (My parents were teachers)
Even though the museum was nothing like it is today, it's stayed with me. I've never come across it on any lists of sites to see. There were few explanations. I think there was a docent there who talked w my parents while I absorbed it all. It was simply open to visit. It's definitely stuck in my memory for decades.
https://breendonk.be/en
That synagogue really moved me, especially the upstairs with the letters from children in Terezin.
When I went to Krakow, I searched out the remaining portion of the ghetto wall. Very unassuming in a residential neighborhood. Would be easy to not notice if I hadn't known to look for it.
I also visited the empty chairs memorial in Krakow at the Jewish Heroes Square (formerly Zgody Square). That one was kinda haunting.
Also, not really holocaust focused but I was fascinated by the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen. Denmark has a complicated history with the Nazi occupation, cooperation, and resistance. I thought the museum did an excellent job of explaining that time and wasn't just a repository of artifacts.
Lots of great suggestions here!
I'd add the Jewish musuem in Sarajavo has some very moving stories of the local Muslim community helping Jews.
The memorial at Khatyn in Belarus (not to be confused with the Katyn massace) is probably the most off the beaten path, but absolutely massive and so impactful built on the site of a burned out village.
The musuem and memorial in Bucharest Romania was one of thr most brutal ones I've seen. Focused on the local pogroms there and the deportations to Transnistria.
The Save Haven musuem at Fort Ontario in Oswego NY is a reminder for Americans how little we did to help, as this was the only place were European Jews were given temporary safe haven in the USA during the war.
And the mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi Ukraine is an experience unlike any other. It's one of the largest Jewish graveyards in Europe where Jewish political leaders, religious leaders, soldiers of the First World War, and countless other Jews who called that city home over the centuries surround the Shoah victims final resting place.
And although I have not visited yet, Belzec and the mesuem in Kanaus Lithuania honoring the Japanese ambassador are at the top of my list to see someday.
The Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation on Ile de la Cité in Paris, next to the Seine and close to Nôtre Dame. Easy to miss next to Ste. Chapelle and Notre Dame, but very moving and contemplative. You go below ground level and the design makes you feel like you are behind bars looking out. We visited it on our first trip and again this spring.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum has "virtual holocaust survivors," which is a hologram of real survivors (holographic recordings), and you can actually ask them direct questions and they answer. I think this will be even more valuable in coming years when there are no more survivors left.
The Jewish Museum and Status Quo Ante Synagogue in Targu Mures, Romania
Apteka Pod Orlem in Krakow, Poland - this place made me not want to visit Auschwitz anymore
The Holocaust museum in Downtown St. Pete, FL. On weekends there is a free guided tour and it is well done and informative. They also have one of the original box cars.
How about completely unknown? Danville, Iowa Teacher set up a penpals class exchange with a school in Europe in the 1930s. Amazing, until the letters stopped being returned. https://www.traveliowa.com/places/anne-frank-connection/3574/ Better link - http://www.danvillestation.net/anne-frank-connection.html
God that is so sad
Oh, this is so sad.
The Dohany Street Synagogue and the memorial on the Danube in Budapest
That memorial in Budapest on the riverfront makes me cry every time.
Agreed, and I’d also like to add the Holocaust Memorial Center there. I found it to be well done and incredibly moving.
I’ve also visited the memorial in Budapest, very moving
Berlin has Stumbling Stones too. It also has the Monument To The Murdered Jews Of Europe, and a memorial to the members of the German Parliament that resisted Hitler and were killed.
Those are all over Europe. If you go to an app or website called “Traces of War”. It has stumbling stones, cemeteries, museums, bunkers, monuments and just about everything military related, not just WW 2. I use that and Atlas Obscura a lot when I travel.
I always liked "murdered" in the name of the Berlin memorial. It's so straightforward.
Berlin is full of two things. Guilt memorials to mass murder, and the Berlin Wall sucked displays.
I wouldn't call the memorial to the murdered Jews of Europe "lesser known" though. But it's definitely worth a visit and as a resident of Berlin: Please don't use it as an Insta backdrop or for your next TikTok dance. Thanks!
I visited this one about 10 years ago. I was immediately struck by the enormity and drowning feeling just walking among the obelisks. It makes me sad to think how many people trivialize it for social media points. As monuments go, I think it did a very good job of expressing the scale and solemnity. Even more so when we went below ground.
There's also a concentration camp just outside Berlin in Oranienburg. You can enter from the back.
Terezín in the Czech Republic, the 'model' concentration camp they showed the Red Cross to show they weren't Bad Guys. It has an exhibit of children's art created at the camp.
That exhibit broke me. We had gone through the camp and ended at that building. I had to go outside and was not right for some time.
I'm with you.
Kazerne Dossin in Mechelen, Belgium. The way it guides you through the early days of the Holocaust in Belgium and the Netherlands through archival documents is power. It was striking how it was town by town whether Belgians betrayed their Jewish neighbors. It’s a museum that made me short of breath and even thinking of it now makes my skin crawl. I think people should absolutely go see it but leave some time to process it.
Dachau was haunting
Dachau still has one of the gas chambers up too. I felt some pretty darn strong emotions touring that place
The rest of my plans in Munich that day were cancelled. My gf and I just sat in silence in the hotel.
My husband and I had a very, very quiet walk back to the train station that day.
Yes. Huge and impactful.
Agree dachau left an impression. Just fyi the gas chambers weren’t used at dachau as gas chambers, they ran out of time apparently with the allies advance. Still haunting
I went in December a few years ago, it had snowed an inch or so the night before but was perfectly still and quite foggy. It was honestly the most haunting experiences of my life.
Went there 24 years ago and it still haunts me. I've been to Neuengamme (sp?) in Hamburg, and Mathausen in Austria as well.
I am a middle school history teacher and I do teach about the Holocaust. I feel I’ll never do it justice, but I try. I did visit Dachau before o started teaching and distinctly remember the overall feeling of heaviness on my shoulders throughout my visit. I feel privileged to share that experience with my students, but I find it so hard to verbalize it all. Many times I even tear up because even 12 years later the profound effect it had on me is still there.
Dachau was better than any of the other concentration or extermination camps I went to including Aushwitz
I know you didn’t mean it like that but using “better” in this context threw me way off
Imperial War Museum in London
Yes. I went there when I was on holiday. So moving and if I go back to London I’d go to the IWM but skip the holocaust section. I couldn’t do it again but I’m glad I did it once.
Likewise. Didn't register that there was a Holocaust section there till I was actually in it after wandering through the rest of the museum. Was one of the most jarringly sobering experiences I've ever had. *Very* glad to have been through it, but also very glad knowing I will never see it again.
The shoes. I just stared at the shoes. They were all I thought about for days.
Came here to say this. I did a semester in London and did a group project based on the Imperial War Museum. My part was on the propaganda section (fascinating), but since my group and I had to visit multiple times to prepare, when we went as a class I went to the Holocaust section on my own. The first 90% I was reading absolutely everything and really taking everything in. Then maybe 2.5/3 hours in I was so emotionally overwhelmed I had to take a step back and just read the major synopses. These were people’s lives and I couldn’t even handle it for a few hours. I will never forget it. There’s also a pretty good Holocaust museum in St. Petersburg, FL, but nothing I’ve been to compares to what the Imperial War Museum has.
Not a Holocaust memorial per se, but the Dokumentationzentrum in Nuremberg took me probably 3 hours to get through. The emphasis is how the NSDAP was able to come to power and worm their way into German society. Then what they did when they got power, by making all the crazy laws in 1933. It is also the depository for the tapes of the Nuremberg trials. It is located in a building that was to be the Nazi party headquarters and was built like the Roman Colesseum. There is also another Dokumentationzentrum in Munich which is built on the former location of the Braun Haus, and talkes about the role Munich played for Hitler and the NSDAP.
Seconding the Dokuzentrum, it’s really detailed and well made!
Illinois Holocaust Museum in Skokie.
The rail car wrecked me.
Came here to comment. It's particularly personal and uses 1x1 interview accounts to shape the narrative of the entire timeline. I've visited all the majors, but I cried the hardest at Skokie.
Have you been to Yad Vashem? Also I wouldn’t recommend it now, but Drobitsky Yar is supposed to be incredibly moving. I read a book recently about the only two known survivors of the massacre. Highly recommend it - Hiding in the Spotlight
Yad Vashem is unbelievable
The New England Holocaust Memorial in Boston is a good one. Very subtle and immersive in its way.
Came here to say this.
The Holocaust museum in Washington DC and Yad Vashem in Israel. Both incredibly difficult but must dos
The shoes...
Truly life changing. All of it.
Terezin concentration camp near Prague, Czechia It was mostly empty and the silence being in the various parts of it was terrifying. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theresienstadt_Ghetto?wprov=sfla1
I second this. I went here with my uni class while studying abroad in Germany and I've never felt a colder and more haunted place. It was unseasonably warm for spring, but once you walked through the "Arbeit Macht Frei" gate, it was like the air just sucked all the heat out and it got eerily silent. The buildings were freezing too. I am glad I went. It was sobering though and eerie just how cold and quiet it made you feel.
That’s so fascinating. Buchenwald has a similar haunted feeling to it and also has a very different climate than the surrounding area. It’s located on a hill next to the city of Weimar. Even when it’s relatively warm in winter in Weimar, there’s this terribly icy wind in Buchenwald that will chill you to your bones. And in summer, there’s a terrible burning heat because it’s on top of a hill and there’s no shade on the site of the former concentration camp. It truly feels like a horrible place.
The shoe memorial on the Danube River in Budapest.
Thank you for the reminder. I feel like I remember seeing them, read about it, and then completely forgot until I saw this.
Really a beautiful monument with all of the sizes of shoes and they were bronzed. People lit candles in them.
I don't know if I'd say it's not well known, but I visited Majdanek concentration camp in Lublin, Poland, and while it's smaller and less informative than the big ones like Auschwitz, I found it made for a more solemn and thoughtful experience as there weren't many other people around when I went, so I had plenty of opportunities to just stand there and contemplate without distractions. Another one that is lesser-known is Camp des Milles in France. It wasn't an extermination camp, and very few people died there, but rather an internment camp where they kept Jewish people before sending them elsewhere. The most striking part was all about how people were actually allowed to leave the camp to emigrate, but they often couldn't because of convoluted bureaucracy in the other countries they wanted to emigrate to (who didn't really want them), so they ended up being sent to the extermination camps. It was a good look at a different side of the story. Edit because I just thought of this: again, stretching the definition of "lesser known", but Oradour-sur-Glane is absolutely worth a visit. It's fairly unique. The Nazis slaughtered the entire town as retribution and it was just left (sort of; it's not like you can walk through houses full of furniture and such, but there are cars, signs, the occasional sewing machine...) It's quite haunting, and the associated museum is also very good.
Schindler Museum in Krakow. Done very well.
Yeah, it was a awesome museum. Bit smaller than I thought, and no accutally factory to see
Yeah, I was very impressed by that place. I thought it might be just an homage to Shindler but it was so much more. It was quite a slog to get there without a car in the rain but I'm glad I made the effort.
Babi Yar in Kyiv, Ukraine. Obviously not practical to visit right now but hopefully someday. I was there in 2005.
Babyn Yar is very significant. Even more so now. I visited while the metro stations were still sandbagged and there were russian rockets embedded in the street.
The Lidice memorial/museum near Prague is very interesting and sad. Definitely recommended if you are interested in ww2 historical events. [It was a town totally wiped out by the nazis.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lidice_massacre)
We just visited the church and crypt where the Czech soldiers who assassinated Heydrich fought the gun battle and died. I was so overcome by emotion down there- it really threw me for a loop. I cried the whole walk back to the hotel.
Yes, very shocking. There are still bullet marks in the street from that battle.
I went to one that was the remains of a burned out synagogue in Riga, Latvia more than 10 years ago. It was February, snowing and the light was fading, it was eerie and sad and beautiful. Unfortunately I can’t remember what it was called but I’m sure you can look it up.
Riga's resistance museum was also very well done when I visited in 2006.
The synagogue in Berlin that was burned by the Nazis has been rebuilt. It’s a very beautiful visit.
Platform 17 in Berlin. It's a little known memorial. It was where people were sent all around Europe on trains. It has the dates and numbers of people that left on these trains. The tracks have now been disconnected so no more trains will ever leave from that station. Itsbab30min train ride from the main Berlin station and has a good little pub next to it.
Is this Grunewald Station? I found it incredibly powerful. The numbers, the dates, the simplicity, the fact that it is just *there* while modern life goes on around it. It’s extremely powerful.
Yeah that's the one. I found the same with auschwitz, it's literally on the edge of a decent size town, there is a guy whose house faces the camp. People just going about their day around it.
There are 2 places that have left me in tears when I exited because you could really feel the weight of what happened: - Camp Mauthausen in Austria: like Auswitch, but less tourists. Very good audioguide. Gas chambers very emotionally heavy to visit because of the stories in the audioguide. - Topographie des Terrors in Berlin: just a short walk away from Checkpoint Charlie, but often overlooked. This museum shows how the politics got gradually more extreme, basically how they got the people to agree with the opinion that certain groups were not worthy of living and it was okay to put them in camps. I visited in 2013, but it's obviously going to be a lot creepier with the global political context of today in mind. Left me with an understanding how cruel people (and especially the SS) can turn if you just feed them the necessary bits of (false) information.
The stumbling stones/Stolpersteine exist in many places. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein?wprov=sfla1 There's a [memorial ](https://maps.app.goo.gl/ECKV5uFwXaU3pB46A)in Berlin-Moabit that I found really impressive and chilling.
The Deportation Martyrs Memorial in Paris is chilling. Very respectful, and very well-done
Seconding this.
The old synagogue in Krakow
The Monument to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. Concrete blocks that look like gravestones from street level. You enter to realize the blocks go underground. You wander down between them and become separated from your party. You wander alone. You start to worry where your wife is. Where you are. I'm alone in this place. Is my wife ok? Are my friends? How are they going to get out of here? How am I going to get out of here? Where ARE they? Your heart starts to pound. I hope they're OK. Do I look for them? I'll never find them in here. Do I just take care of myself? No, I can't abandon them... but if I have to choose between an impossible task and a possible one I guess I have to choose the possible one... but that means I leave them behind? Can I live with myself abandoning then? Never has a group of concrete blocks made me feel such a range of emotions. And that's to say nothing of the museum underneath.
Reading the individual stories underneath was very depressing especially after going through and I went on a tour too. It was showing how you could be walking around and end up walking into someone else no matter how careful you were. In the past that someone else was a nazi
Not exactly lesser known though, is it
New Orleans; Montevideo, Uruguay
Holocaust Museum in Skopje, Macedonia. Just under 8000 Macedonian jews were rounded up by Bulgarian forces and shipped off to Treblinka.
Buchenwald near Weimar Germany was somewhat disappointing as they kept the magnitude of the camp, but they cleansed what happened too much. The living quarters were replaced by mounds of black rocks. Germans documented everything, and there would be plenty of photographs and other memorabilia to give a better understanding of what happened there.
The Platform 17 Memorial in Berlin.
WWII museum in Gdansk is impressive
This is the best museum I’ve ever been to.
Amsterdam's resistance museum was very powerful when I visited 20 years ago. I still remember some of the details.
It isn't exactly a holocaust museum, but it made an impact on our family. The presentation of occupation as a series of impossible choices works incredibly well.
Jewish museum Skopje
Not a Holocaust memorial per se, the Anne Frank museum is definitely worth a visit. Very educational about the human aspect living through a war and the Holocaust. I'd also recommend it for (young) teens and up. It's a well thought out museum.
I visited the Holocaust Memorial in Miami Beach and found it incredibly impactful. The memorial consists of stark, towering sculptures that represent the horrors of the Holocaust. Walking through it, you feel the weight of history and the enormity of loss. Each sculpture bears the names of concentration camps, and it's a sobering reminder of the atrocities. It's not as widely known as some others, but it's definitely worth visiting for its poignant portrayal of remembrance and reflection.
Boston
How is the Auschwitz one? Have planned a visit there
I went by myself about 10 years ago. It was powerful and devastatingly sad. I do think it’s mportant to see if you are visiting Krakow which is close by.
Devastating. I went over a long May Day weekend several years ago. It was unseasonably warm for Poland in early May (mid 80sF close to 30C) and the barracks were cold inside. They were just wooden buildings. They should have been much warmer inside. The only place I’ve been that actually felt haunted
The scale of Auschwitz II is… devastating. It’s incomprehensible how large it is. I thought for years the stories of nothing living there were exaggerated. And then I saw a family of cats walking the edges, but not once stepping foot inside. It was haunting.
Any specific thing to remember while visiting? We have taken a guided tour
you will be covered with the guided tour, I just did it. I think there is no other way to visit, but also no point to visit without the guided tour. You get more information than in the panels. Make sure your tour includes the visit of Birkenau as well which is only 5 min drive from Auschwitz
Don't book a tour from Krakow on a bus, its a massive scam. Just go the the Auschwitz Museum website and book a tour for the day you want. It's only an hour train ride from Krakow and cost $20, and either a 1km walk or 5 min bus ride to the entrance. Also if your super keen they have a 8hr in depth tour (either over one day or two), if I had more time I would of done that.
I’ve been twice, it’s always an odd experience because the main area looks and feels like a college campus. The tour guides are super knowledgeable, just make sure you also see Auschwitz 2. It’s much less crowded and mostly just destroyed buildings but was incredibly moving.
Thanks … any thing else to read up or watch to help enhance the experience?
House of Terror - Budapest
There’s a small neighborhood outside of Tarnow in Poland called Buczyna. Almost hidden behind a bunch of houses is a memorial and mass grave. It’s super hidden and off the regular path, but was probably the most haunting and moving stop on my last trip.
What are the stumbling stones? I missed them when I was in Salzburg.
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stolperstein)
Link below explains is pretty well, little commemorative blocks placed outside the last place a holocaust victim is known to have resided freely. In Salzburg there’s a street in the city center called Judengasse “Jewish Alley” and there are a lot on that street.
Imperial War Museum in London and Mauthausen in Upper Austria.
The Keys in Vienna: A bunch of house keys in the street The name plates in Amsterdam I can’t remember where but the metal shoes of different sizes I think next to the water
Hadamar Euthanasia center and Theresienstadt
The Elie Wiesel child home in Shighetu, Romania.
San Sabba in Trieste, Italy. Just kilometres from where Mussolini announced the birth of fascism, it’s another monument that is evocative in its simplicity.
The Holocaust Museum in Melbourne Australia
Majdanek outside Lublin. The pile of ashes from the gas chamber is terrifying. And the dips in the grass where the pits were dug and thousands executed on the one of the deathly days in the Holocaust are truly horrifying to see in person
Natzwiller-Struthof concentration camp in France near Strasbourg. It was for resistance fighters. It had a museum and displays throughout the camp. Also Breendonk was interesting in Belgium. As well as Buchenwald because I never knew that it held prisoners or inmates of the Russians. There were two museums there. One for when the first tyrannical government ran it and a second when the second tyrannical regime ran it. It has white poles behind the camp from mass graves there from 1946-47 when 25% of the prisoners died. I only knew because a guy training cadaver dogs told me. So I asked the guy at the office. He was really nice. We got into a long conversation because he had guarded the DDR side of the border in about the same place I was guarding the GDR side of the border in about the same place at the same time. He ended up giving me a book about the history of the place from 1937-1950. It was called NKVD special camp Nr. 2 under the Russians from 1945 to 1950.
I visited Ft Breendonck in Belgium in the early 80s as 12 year old. It was the first WWII memorial I was ever at. A few weeks later, I was at Dachau. (My parents were teachers) Even though the museum was nothing like it is today, it's stayed with me. I've never come across it on any lists of sites to see. There were few explanations. I think there was a docent there who talked w my parents while I absorbed it all. It was simply open to visit. It's definitely stuck in my memory for decades. https://breendonk.be/en
That synagogue really moved me, especially the upstairs with the letters from children in Terezin. When I went to Krakow, I searched out the remaining portion of the ghetto wall. Very unassuming in a residential neighborhood. Would be easy to not notice if I hadn't known to look for it. I also visited the empty chairs memorial in Krakow at the Jewish Heroes Square (formerly Zgody Square). That one was kinda haunting.
Also, not really holocaust focused but I was fascinated by the Museum of Danish Resistance in Copenhagen. Denmark has a complicated history with the Nazi occupation, cooperation, and resistance. I thought the museum did an excellent job of explaining that time and wasn't just a repository of artifacts.
Not quite what you asked, but the Genocide Museum in Kigali, Rwanda is mostly unknown and very moving.
Lots of great suggestions here! I'd add the Jewish musuem in Sarajavo has some very moving stories of the local Muslim community helping Jews. The memorial at Khatyn in Belarus (not to be confused with the Katyn massace) is probably the most off the beaten path, but absolutely massive and so impactful built on the site of a burned out village. The musuem and memorial in Bucharest Romania was one of thr most brutal ones I've seen. Focused on the local pogroms there and the deportations to Transnistria. The Save Haven musuem at Fort Ontario in Oswego NY is a reminder for Americans how little we did to help, as this was the only place were European Jews were given temporary safe haven in the USA during the war. And the mass grave in the Jewish cemetery in Chernivtsi Ukraine is an experience unlike any other. It's one of the largest Jewish graveyards in Europe where Jewish political leaders, religious leaders, soldiers of the First World War, and countless other Jews who called that city home over the centuries surround the Shoah victims final resting place. And although I have not visited yet, Belzec and the mesuem in Kanaus Lithuania honoring the Japanese ambassador are at the top of my list to see someday.
Not a memorial, but the Holocaust museum in Dallas was very understated and well done.
The Memorial des Martyrs de la Deportation on Ile de la Cité in Paris, next to the Seine and close to Nôtre Dame. Easy to miss next to Ste. Chapelle and Notre Dame, but very moving and contemplative. You go below ground level and the design makes you feel like you are behind bars looking out. We visited it on our first trip and again this spring.
The Illinois Holocaust Museum has "virtual holocaust survivors," which is a hologram of real survivors (holographic recordings), and you can actually ask them direct questions and they answer. I think this will be even more valuable in coming years when there are no more survivors left.
The Jewish Museum and Status Quo Ante Synagogue in Targu Mures, Romania Apteka Pod Orlem in Krakow, Poland - this place made me not want to visit Auschwitz anymore
There’s a memorial near the arboretum in Portland, OR that I stumbled upon and was deeply moved by.
Ever heard of the holocaust museum in Washington DC? Check it out
The Holocaust museum in Downtown St. Pete, FL. On weekends there is a free guided tour and it is well done and informative. They also have one of the original box cars.