Attention! Since April 1, 2008 groups bigger than 10 people are requested to hire a headphone guiding system - cost: 4 zlotys per person
Attention! Because of a large number of visitors in the Museum, touring some of the main exhibition buildings may be difficult in some hours. Sometimes you need to wait upto 30 minutes to enter - that considers especially the block 11 ("The block of death"). While planning your visit in the Museum please take into consideration that the time of the visit may be prolonged
Admission to the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial is free of charge
To date, over 25,000,000 from all over the world have visited the Museum and Memorial. Since the early 1990s, over half a million people-almost half of them Poles, most of them young people-have visited each year. Almost 250,000 visitors come from over 100 foreign countries (mostly from the USA, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, Italy, and Israel).
A - Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (site of Auschwitz I). The visitor reception center is located in the building adjacent to the parking lot
B - Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum (site of Auschwitz II-Birkenau)
The grounds and buildings of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps are open to visitors in their entirety, with the exception of several blocks in Auschwitz I that house the administration, Museum departments, and storage. There is generally access to all barracks at Auschwitz II-Birkenau. The duration of a visit is determined solely by the individual interests and needs of the visitors. As a minimum, however, at least one-and-a-half hours each should be reserved for the grounds and exhibitions of Auschwitz I and for the Birkenau site. It is necessary to visit both parts of the camp, Birkenau and Auschwitz, in order to acquire a proper sense of the place that has become the symbol of the Holocaust.
Auschwitz I is where the Nazis opened the first Auschwitz camps for men and women, where they carried out the first experiments at using Zyklon B to put people to death, where they murdered the first mass transports of Jews, where they conducted the first criminal experiments on prisoners, where they carried out most of the executions by shooting, where the central jail for prisoners from all over the camp complex was located in Block No. 11, and where the camp commandant's office and most of the SS offices were located. From here, the camp administration directed the further expansion of the camp complex.
In the Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, everything happened on a magnified scale. This is where the Nazis erected most of the machinery of mass extermination in which they murdered approximately one million European Jews. At the same time, Birkenau was the largest concentration camp (with nearly 300 primitive barracks, most of them wooden). Over a hundred thousand prisoners at a time were here: Jews, Poles, Roma, and others. The site of this camp contains places that are still full of human ashes; the greatest portion of what remains of the Auschwitz complex is here. The vastness of the space, the primitive barracks for the prisoners, the ruins or remains of other structures, and the miles of camp fence and roads give a full sense of what cannot be conveyed in words: infinite baseness, cruelty, and human criminality, and the specific camp architecture that served one purpose alone: the destruction of human beings.
From January 2005, the so-called Judenrampe has been commemorated. This is the siding located between Auschwitz and Birkenau and it was here that in 1942-1944 deported Jews, Poles, Roma, and others arrived. Up until May 1944 newly arrived Jews were selected by SS doctors there.
The first gas chamber, located beyond the borders of the Museum and started by the Germans in spring 1942, is also commemorated. It is located not far from Birkenau and is known as the Little Red House.
Tickets for screenings of the fifteen-minute documentary film about the first moments after the liberation of the camp may be purchased at the information point in the visitor reception building, at the site of Auschwitz I.
II. Guides
- Only guides licensed by the Museum are authorized to serve visitors. - Visitors arriving in groups are required to engage a guide. This ensures efficient movement around the entire Museum grounds and full information about the museum, the buildings and their history, and the exhibitions. - It is possible at set times for individual visitors to assemble into a group and engage a guide (in Polish, English, or German). Assembly times for these groups are available at the Museum.
Guides (there are more than 150 of them) are available to serve visitors in Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish.
Guide services may be reserved:
- on the Internet - or by telephone at (+4833) 843 21 33 / 844 81 00 / 844 80 99 – these numbers are available Monday through Friday from 7:00 AM to 3:00 PM local standard time (0600-1400 UTC) - or by sending a fax to (+4833) 843 22 27 - or in person at the Visitor Reception Point at the Museum, where all other formalities can also be arranged. We recommend prior reservations in view of the large numbers of visitors and high demand for guide services.
III. Transportation between the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau sites.
The three-kilometer distance between the sites of the Auschwitz and Birkenau Concentration Camps can be covered on foot through the camp "Interest Zone," where there were German factories, workshops, warehouses, offices, and camp auxiliary facilities during the Occupation, and where prisoners labored and died. Here, too, there are railroad sidings and platforms, the "ramps" where trains full of deportees arrived and where the SS carried out selections. There are parking lots near both camps for visitors travelling by car. There is also a shuttle bus that runs once an hour between Auschwitz I and Birkenau from April 15 to October 31.
Booking Transport & Taxis to Auschwitz:
There are various options for getting to Auschwitz from either Krakow or Katowice. Here at HotelRaider we offer 2 options -
For taxi transfers from Katowice or Katowice Airport to Auschwitz please contact us for a quote at info@hotelraider.com
Auschwitz Video
Pupils think Auschwitz is a beer
Some schoolchildren believe Auschwitz is the name of a type of beer or a religious festival, rather than the notorious concentration camp
Around 1.3 million people perished in the Nazi death camp during the Second World War, but a survey of more than 1,000 secondary school pupils aged 11-16 revealed that a quarter still did not know its purpose.
Of those, about 10% were not sure what it was, 8% thought it was a country bordering Germany, 2% thought it was a beer, the same proportion said it was a religious festival and a further 1% said it was a type of bread.
Miramax and the London Jewish Cultural Centre, which commissioned the survey to mark the DVD release of The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas, said that, as there are around 4.5 million 11 to 16-year-olds in the UK, this is the equivalent of 90,000 youngsters wrongly identifying Auschwitz as a drink and 45,000 mistaking it for bread.
The poll found that six in 10 youngsters did not know what the Final Solution was, with a fifth claiming it was the name of peace talks held to end the war.
And it revealed that, despite the Holocaust being specified on the secondary National Curriculum as a subject that pupils must be taught, only just over a third (37%) knew that the Holocaust claimed the lives of six million Jews, with many drastically under-estimating the death toll.
While 97% of those questioned could identify Adolf Hitler from a photograph, those who could not mistook famous figures such as Winston Churchill, Salvador Dali and Albert Einstein for the dictator.
The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas tells the story of a German boy's friendship with a Jewish child held in a concentration camp.
Miramax is working with the charity Film Education to encourage the film to be used as a way of improving children's knowledge about the Holocaust.
The survey conducted by Dubit questioned 1,200 secondary school children aged 11-16 between February 9 and 27.
