A special travel journal ...

 As a life long educator, I love the habit of making notes of things that I might want to research or remember.  I always come back from trips with notes I want to add to. 

I have for at least a decade, kept travel journals of my many trips across Europe & Africa. It means you can easily find place names for photos or info you wanted to keep. 

I travel with a small pencil case & some paper clips to keep maps, tickets etc secure until I return home to complete the journal. It joins the others on my desk upstairs where only I am privy to the thoughts I jotted down.                   

I also have various pens including one with the 4 colours that you select, it is very useful en route. Sometimes I do little illustrations so I have a pencil too. The compact pink pencil case was a gift from the eldest daughter - made from reused sari's in India - a project that supports rural women. 

In 2022, I had 3 trips fairly close together (Transylvania, Holocaust, Africa)  so I decided to  use this red travel journal for the Holocaust trip. The trip was the Anne Frank & Oskar Schindler tour so I bought this postcard at Bergen Belsen as it is a permanent reminder of the trip.             

This past week I have been editing the blog posts & today I brought my travel journal down from my desk upstairs & opened it.  Memories came flooding back of the trip & the experiences we had at the many camps we visited. It is the first time I have re read parts of it since the trip & I am so glad that I put in maps, leaflets, entrance cards, details along the way. 

It is never a neat work because it is often written on the way, on a coach or at a hotel desk at night - snatched moments but they are capture the thoughts at that moment, how the experience touches you along the way. This is true too for trips to other places like Transylvania - it is capturing a moment to return to. 

 I took photos of some of the inserts from my travel journal which were important to some of the places we visited on the tour ... 

These were the maps & documents from the Sachsenhausen camp. It is a reminder how vast that camp was & how it is still being added to as a remembrance facility as they recover artefacts from the site. 

The notes from Bergen Belsen's excellent museum are very informative. I found this camp quite emotional - the sort that comes over you suddenly in the bleak forests knowing that each of the mounds is a mass burial ground, 

Krakow Ghetto & the influence of Oskar Schindler's factory on saving thousands by listing them on his books. The sites across beautiful Krakow remind one that they suffered such indignities & horror that we can not even imagine across a whole city. 

Terezin, previously known as Theresienstadt, was over several sites so it was useful to have the maps & names of the various sites to correct my blog entry. The pretty town was held up as a model town but the truth was just under the surface ... 

Wannsee - the conference where the Final Solution was signed off & where it became policy. The  importance of this conference  followed us across our tour …

This past week, with the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz- Birkenau, I thought I really should blog my trip it so it is noted for the future. I spent several hours just working from the travel itinerary, keen to get it done. Time passed quickly & it ended up being in 7 parts. 

I hope they have been of interest to some of you

# 1 Following Anne Frank's Holocaust journey ... 

#2 Berlin's Holocaust journey ... 

#3 Krakow & Oskar Schindler's Holocaust journey ... 

#4 Operation Anthropoid & Reinhard Heydrich 

#5 Theresienstadt model town in the Holocaust 

#6 Auschwitz Birkenau & the Frank family 

#7 Nuremburg & some justice for the Holocaust 

I hope you are inspired to keep a log, a journal, a record however brief, of your trips too. 

Dee