Suwalki

Suwalki - darkometer rating : 3 - The capital of the most north-eastern of Poland 's provinces. Suwalki isn't a prime dark (nor mainstream) tourist destination, but primarily a convenient place for a stopover when touring the north-east of Poland, and perhaps for carrying on into Lithuania . It does offer a couple of minor dark attractions of its own too, though. > What there is to see > Location > Access and costs > Time required > Combinations with other dark destinations > Combinations with non-dark destinations > Photos What there is to see: first and foremost there is the town cemetery. It is subdivided into various sections, of which the former Jewish part is a poignant reminder of a) the near complete disappearance of Jewish life (and even graves) from this area, due to the Holocaust during World War II and b) the fact that the repercussions of Nazism are still not fully overcome. The area that the former Jewish cemetery covered is largely empty today, except for the odd remaining grave and, in particular, a wall made of fragments of Jewish gravestones which were smashed up by the Nazis back then. Much more recently, this monument has shockingly been daubed with several swastikas. I had already read about this disgrace on the Internet in an article dated March 2007. When I visited in August 2008, the swastikas were still there! Obviously nobody felt a need to remove them. In fact, some of the swastikas seemed to be more recent additions, in brown colour at that! These looked less faded than the white ones I had seen photos of. But the latter were still quite visible too. I am of course aware of the fact that Poland has a neo-Nazi problem of its own …. though how this is possible in a country that suffered so much at the hands of the Nazis will forever remain completely beyond me.