Warwas Budapest Vienna and Prague 2022
I was in the 5-person tour that returned on 5/6. It was nice to see all the Ukrainian flags and displays of support for Ukraine. All the tour guides, shopkeepers, and various locals that we encountered were very happy to have tourists returning. The venues were relatively uncrowded, which made them much more enjoyable. I took the optional trio to Auschwitz, which was intense and very moving.
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I did not do this trip with Tauck but I have done the trip with another provider. It was probably the most emotionally moving tour I've ever been on. I think everybody should experience what the horrors of the Holocaust actually were. Perhaps it would make people think more about their own prejudices. The visit to Schindler's factory and a separate trip to Israel where I went to Yad Vashem were equally emotionally moving.
I am not Jewish so I am not saying this from a personal perspective but I did have a Polish landlady long ago in my youth who had survived the atrocities in Auschwitz. She once showed me the tattoo on her arm but she never spoke about the camp except to acknowledge she was there. After I had visited the camp, I wished I could have had a conversation with her but she had passed away. She lived until her 90's.
I took this East-Central European tour with Tauck a few years ago with an amazing tour director. Having been a Soviet-East European studies major in college years earlier, it was amazing to see in person many of the locations that I had previously studied about in books that had experienced pre-WWII and post-WWII history. Everyone should have the opportunity to do so in person and maybe folks would truly understand what that area went through in the past before today. Sigh. As an aside, one of our local tour guides on that tour, quietly noted that both her grandfather (when the Nazis had occupied her country) and her father (when the Soviet Russians and their cohorts were running the country after WWII) had to deal with how things were then; she did not go into details but I still remember how anxious her life had been then. Sigh.