2 days / 928 km covered


ITINERARY:

11/07 - DAY I: Poděbrady - Auschwitz Birkenau - Cracow (453 km)

12/07 - DAY II:  Cracow - Poděbrady (475 km)


BACKGROUND (Wikipedia.com):

The Auschwitz concentration camp was a complex of over 40 concentration andextermination camps operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War II and the Holocaust. It consisted of:
Auschwitz I, the main camp in Oświęcim;
Auschwitz II-Birkenau, a concentration and extermination camp built with several gas chambers;
Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a labor camp created to staff a factory for the chemical conglomerateIG Farben; and dozens of subcamps.

The camps became a major site of the Nazis'Final Solution to the Jewish Question.

After Germany sparked World War II by invading Poland in September 1939, the Schutzstaffel (SS) converted Auschwitz I, an army barracks, into a prisoner-of-war camp for Polish political prisoners. The first inmates, German criminals brought to the camp in May 1940 as functionaries, established the camp's reputation for sadism; prisoners were beaten, tortured, and executed for the most trivial reasons. The first gassings—of Soviet and Polish prisoners—took place in block 11 of Auschwitz I around August 1941. Construction of Auschwitz II began the following month, and from 1942 until late 1944 freight trains delivered Jews from all over German-occupied Europe to its gas chambers. Of the 1.3 million people sent to Auschwitz, 1.1 million died. The death toll includes 960,000 Jews (865,000 of whom were gassed on arrival), 74,000 non-Jewish Poles, 21,000 Roma, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and up to 15,000 other Europeans. Those not gassed died of starvation, exhaustion, disease, individual executions, or beatings. Others were killed during medical experiments.