Oswiecim

Hardly an attraction in the normal sparkly sense, Oświęcim is a medium-sized industrial town 60km (37mi) west of Kraków. The Polish name may be unfamiliar but its German rendering, Auschwitz, is tragically resonant. What’s left of the death factories still evokes the magnitude of the holocaust.

Between 1.1 and 1.5 million people, 90% of them Jews, were killed in Auschwitz and the linked complex at nearby Birkenau. Both remain basically as they were when abandoned by the Nazis. The stories which live in the gas chambers, crematoria, barracks and barbed wire make this a haunted and shocking place.