Category: shoes

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Dark Tourism & Shoes

This is the theme that came second in our latest poll. The winning theme, ‘DT & Shadows’, featured in the previous post, and in that I already announced that I would post the second ranked themes without a new poll. So now for ‘DT & Shoes’. By the way, I’m using “shoes” in a wide sense to include boots, trainers, stilettos, etc. as well as regular shoes.

What do you first think of when contemplating where shoes and dark tourism meet? For many people it will probably be this

5 Years Anniversary & a New Poll

Today it’s the fifth anniversary of this Blog, i.e. five years to the day since the very first post appeared here. To mark this occasion, I’ve selected five of my favourite photos ever to have featured on the Blog (and made sure none of those featured in the Blog post on the first anniversary four years ago are repeated). For the new poll, scroll to the bottom …

I’m particularly fond of this first photo, taken from the

Return to Auschwitz

Today is International Holocaust Remembrance Day, aka “Auschwitz Day”, as it was on this date, 27 January, that in 1945 the Soviet Red Army arrived at Auschwitz and liberated the camp, after the SS had largely “evacuated” it already and sent most of its inmates on death marches, to camps further away from the westward-moving front line in a WWII that was already de facto lost for Germany.

It also so happened that a little earlier this month I revisited the memorial sites at Auschwitz as part of a six-day trip to Kraków and Oświęcim, planned at short notice. So I decided to do another Auschwitz Day post (see also

Sered

here’s a Blog post about the Sered Holocaust Museum, which I visited in late October this year.

The museum is housed in the original barracks of what was Sered’s labour/concentration camp in the Holocaust in Slovakia during WWII.

As is often the case on this Blog, the post is primarily a short photo essay with just essential information.

There were in fact several labour camps for Jews in Slovakia from ca. 1941 onwards. After the Slovak National Uprising in August 1944, which was quickly and brutally crushed by Nazi Germany (see Muzeum SNP), these camps became proper concentration camps, now run by the SS, and also

Budapest in 2022

This past Whitsun weekend I was in Budapest. Even though it’s just a 2 ½ hour train ride from Vienna (where I live) I hadn’t been to this fabulous capital city of Hungary since October 2008, so a re-visit was overdue. I had only a bit over 48 hours there but used the time well. Here’s a short report with some selected photos:

In terms of dark tourism my first priority was a sight that I learned about only after my previous visit to Budapest. That’s the Hospital in the Rock and

Majdanek

On (or around) this day, 77 years ago, on 23 July 1944, the concentration camp of Majdanek was liberated by the Soviet Red Army. They found only a few hundred weak and ill prisoners left. The rest had already been “evacuated”. The SS retreated with such haste that they didn’t destroy much evidence of their deeds here, so the