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Gdańsk: Where World War II Started — and One of Poland's Greatest Cities
At 4:45am on 1 September 1939, the German warship Schleswig-Holstein opened fire on the Polish military transit depot at Westerplatte, on the outskirts of Gdańsk. The 182 Polish defenders held for seven days against overwhelming German force. It was ...
Warsaw: The City That Refused to Die — History and What to See
No major European capital suffered more in the Second World War than Warsaw. By January 1945, when Soviet troops entered the city, it was a sea of rubble — 85% of its buildings destroyed, its entire pre-war population of 1.3 million expelled or kille...
Wrocław: Poland's Most Beautiful Market Square and Why You Should Visit
Wrocław (formerly the German city of Breslau) is one of Central Europe's most interesting cities — not just for its jaw-dropping Gothic and Renaissance market square, but for the layered, complicated history carved into every stone of this place that...
Visiting Auschwitz-Birkenau: What You Need to Know Before You Go
Auschwitz-Birkenau — the network of Nazi German concentration and extermination camps near the Polish town of Oświęcim — was the site of the murder of approximately 1.1 million people, 90% of them Jewish, between 1940 and 1945. Visiting is a solemn a...
Slovakia Travel Guide: The Best Hotels, Castles, and Places to Stay
Slovakia sits at the dead centre of Europe — bordered by Austria to the west, Hungary to the south, Ukraine to the east, and the Czech Republic and Poland to the north — and is visited by a fraction of the tourists its neighbours receive. That is cha...