プラハからのTerezinへの半日ツアー

Our tour guide to Terezin Concentration Camp, with Precious Legacy Tours, was with the tour guide Jan Udržal. Jan is an AMAZING guide, the best one could ever hope for: incredibly intelligent, articulate, sensitive, historically knowledgeable (to an astonishing degree); thoughtful, kind, considerate, extremely responsive to the needs (sometimes for more information; sometimes for less, as things are "taken in"; sometimes for asking questions; sometimes for letting silence occur; aware of those touring the site perhaps needing/wanting to set their own pace, at the same time he's able to make suggestions and offer various options for how they might wish to choose to spend their time at the site, since there's always more than one can do). All in all, Jan is one of the best guides one could ever hope to encounter, and not least, for viewing/experiencing such an important but painful historical site.

This was an incredibly, eye-opening tour. Visited with wife and college-age son. Heart rending experience, to be sure. Luba, our guide knows everything to know about this concentration camp, in part because she is personally acquainted with several surviving prisoners. It is impossible to absorb everything there is to learn here, and the casual traveller to Prague likely will not want to spend multiple days at Terezin, but Lubba took us through the site--two "fortresses" built and maintained by the Austro-Hungarian Empire since the late 1700s and itself a marvel of engineering--at a pace balancing the desire to see and teach as much as possible while not completely wearing us out. We did not expect to have a separate driver (a dapper young man named "Bruno," who was as engaging as one could want), and at first I thought it a little overkill, but as we went along I decided it was extremely useful, as it freed-up Luba to concentrate on her dialogue while traveling to/from Terezin (about an hour), and it also allowed Luba and us to be dropped off strategically. Be ready: there is some walking to do, as compact as the site may be. We were there in early March, and it was cold, but we were adequately dressed. From what I heard, it can be crowded in May/June, so factor that in. Bottom line: a tour of the site is a must, you will get so much more out of it with a guide (private or otherwise), and Luba and Bruno were wonderful.