Krakow
is Poland's former capitol and its 3rd
largest City. Until very recently
Krakow was hidden from the western
world by the Iron Curtain now however,
it has joined the EU since the
downfall of the communist led
government.
The
film Schindlers List was shot in and
around Krakow and it shows how, during
the early part of the second world war
the Nazi's began to round up Jews and
place then into Ghettos before finally
moving them to Concentration camps
such as Auschwitz
Auschwitz
was the largest of the
Nazi German
concentration camps. It
was named after the nearby town of
Oświęcim, situated about 50
kilometers west of
Kraków, and 286 kilometers from
Warsaw. Following the Nazi
occupation of Poland in September
1939, Oświęcim was incorporated into
Germany and renamed Auschwitz.
The
camp complex consisted of three main
camps: Auschwitz I, the administrative
center; Auschwitz II (Birkenau), an
extermination camp or
Vernichtungslager; and Auschwitz
III (Monowitz), a work camp. There
were also around 40 satellite camps,
some of them tens of kilometers from
the main camps, with prisoner
populations ranging from several dozen
to several thousand.
The
exact number killed in Auschwitz is
not known. The camp commandant,
Rudolf Höss, testifed at the
Nuremberg Trials that three
million had died there. The Auschwitz-Birkenau
State Museum revised this figure in
1990, and new calculations now place
the figure at 1.1–1.6 million, about
90 percent of them
Jews from almost every country in
Europe.
