🇵🇱 Poland · Lesser Poland and the Tatras (Kraków)
Auschwitz-Birkenau is not a tourist destination like the others, and this guide does not treat it as one. It is the place where Nazi Germany carried out the greatest mass murder in history: here, between 1940 and 1945, around 1.1 million people were murdered, close to a million of them Jews, along with Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war, Poles and other victims. Visiting the Memorial is an act of memory and respect towards those victims, and a way of understanding at first hand what human beings are capable of when hatred and racism become state policy.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and State Museum, in the Polish town of Oświęcim, preserves the two main sectors of the complex: Auschwitz I, the original camp with its brick buildings and the infamous 'Arbeit macht frei' inscription over the gate, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the immense extermination camp with its barracks, the railway tracks that ran into it and the ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria the Nazis tried to destroy before fleeing. Since 1979 it has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site, and 27 January — the day of its liberation in 1945 — is now International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
This guide brings together practical, sober information for visiting with the seriousness the place deserves: how to get there from Kraków, why entry is free but booking a pass is compulsory, what you see in each sector, how long the visit takes and some recommendations on how to behave. It is a hard visit, but for many an essential one: as the writer and survivor recalled, to forget would be to prove the killers right.
The Auschwitz camp was created by Nazi Germany in 1940 in the occupied Polish town of Oświęcim, initially for Polish political prisoners. In 1941-1942 it was expanded with the gigantic Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp, conceived as an extermination centre within the 'Final Solution', the Nazi plan to murder the Jews of Europe. Hundreds of thousands of Jews arrived at Auschwitz by train from all over Europe, along with Roma, Soviet prisoners and Poles. Most were murdered in the gas chambers on arrival; others died from slave labour, hunger, disease and experiments. It is estimated that around 1.1 million people were murdered there. The camp was liberated by the Soviet Red Army on 27 January 1945. In 1947, Poland created the State Museum to preserve the site as a memorial. It has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979. The full history is on our history page.
Read the full history ↓Historic Poland at its purest: Kraków, the royal capital for centuries, with Wawel, the university of 1364 and the Jewish quarter of Kazimierz; the salt of Wieliczka; the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp; and the mountains of the góral people at Zakopane.
Read the history of Lesser Poland and the Tatras (Kraków) →No exact prices: a scale from $ (budget) to $$$$$ (luxury), with 2-3 options per category.
Origins, formation and what the sources say.
Before it became a byword for the greatest crime in history, Auschwitz was simply Oświęcim, a quiet town in southern Poland with centuries of history. Founded in the Middle Ages, set at a crossroads of roads and railways, Oświęcim had at the beginning of the twentieth century a mixed population, with a large and ancient Jewish community that made up more than half its inhabitants and lived alongside the Polish Catholic majority. It was an ordinary town, with its market, its synagogues and its churches.
Everything changed with the German invasion of Poland on 1 September 1939, which began the Second World War. Nazi Germany occupied the country and annexed this region directly to the Reich, Germanising the place names: Oświęcim became Auschwitz. The Polish and Jewish population was subjected to the terror of occupation.
The Nazis chose this place to set up a concentration camp for very specific and cold reasons: Oświęcim was well connected by rail with the rest of occupied Europe, which would allow prisoners to be transported from far away; there were empty Polish military barracks that served as an initial base; and the area was relatively out of the way. That combination of logistical factors would turn a peaceful Polish town into the centre of the Nazi machinery of extermination.
The Auschwitz concentration camp was created on SS orders in the spring of 1940, using the former Polish army barracks on the edge of Oświęcim. Its first commandant was Rudolf Höss. It was not initially conceived as an extermination camp, but as a concentration camp intended above all for Polish political prisoners: intellectuals, members of the resistance, priests, opponents and citizens the Nazi regime considered dangerous.
The first large transport of prisoners arrived in June 1940: they were mostly Poles. Over the entrance gate the Nazis placed the iron inscription 'Arbeit macht frei' ('Work sets you free'), a cynical slogan concealing a reality of forced labour, hunger, humiliation and death. Conditions were appalling: prisoners died of exhaustion, beatings, disease, hunger and execution.
In these first years, Auschwitz was above all a place of terror against the Polish nation. Thousands of Poles were shot at the 'Death Wall' of Block 11 or murdered in other ways. Among the prisoners of this period was the priest Maximilian Kolbe, who in 1941 volunteered to die of starvation in place of another prisoner, a family man, and who was later canonised by the Catholic Church. Here too, in the cellar of Block 11, the Nazis carried out in 1941 the first killing trials with Zyklon B gas, a step that foreshadowed the even greater horror to come.
In 1941 the Nazis began building a second, much larger camp, about 3 km from the original, at a place called Brzezinka (Birkenau in German): this was Auschwitz II-Birkenau. This enormous camp — nearly 2 km² — would become the centre of mass extermination. Its construction coincided with the Nazi decision to carry out the 'Final Solution of the Jewish question' (Endlösung), that is, the systematic murder of all the Jews of Europe, coordinated from the Wannsee Conference of January 1942.
From 1942, Auschwitz-Birkenau was turned into the largest slaughterhouse in history. From all over occupied Europe — Poland, Hungary, France, the Netherlands, Greece, Italy, Slovakia and many other countries — trains set off packed with people crammed into cattle wagons, on journeys of days without water or food. On arrival at the Birkenau 'ramp', SS officers carried out the 'selection': most of the new arrivals — the elderly, children, the sick, mothers with their children — were sent straight to the gas chambers, disguised as showers, where they were murdered with Zyklon B. Their bodies were burned in the crematoria. Only a minority, considered fit for slave labour, were registered and interned, only to die later of exhaustion, hunger or disease.
The complex was completed with a third camp, Auschwitz III-Monowitz, a forced labour camp linked to the German chemical industry (IG Farben), and with dozens of subcamps. At Auschwitz, moreover, the SS doctor Josef Mengele and others carried out cruel experiments on prisoners, including children and twins. It is estimated that, in total, around 1.1 million people were murdered in the Auschwitz complex, close to a million of them Jews; the rest were mostly Roma (Gypsies), Soviet prisoners of war and Poles.
Despite the absolute terror, there were forms of resistance inside Auschwitz. There was a clandestine prisoners' organisation that secretly documented the crimes and managed to get information and photographs out. In October 1944, a group from the Sonderkommando — the Jewish prisoners forced to work in the crematoria — staged a desperate revolt and managed to partly destroy one of the crematoria before being wiped out. There were also escapes that served to alert the world, such as that of the Slovaks Rudolf Vrba and Alfréd Wetzler, whose report described how the camp worked.
At the end of 1944, with the Soviet Red Army advancing from the east, the SS began to erase the traces of their crimes: they blew up the gas chambers and crematoria at Birkenau, burned documents and, in January 1945, evacuated tens of thousands of prisoners in the infamous 'death marches', forcing them to walk in the depths of winter towards the interior of Germany; many died of cold, exhaustion or were shot along the way.
On 27 January 1945, Soviet Red Army troops reached Auschwitz and liberated the roughly 7,000 prisoners left in the camp, most of them sick and dying, too weak to have been evacuated. What the soldiers found — the barracks, the mountains of victims' belongings, the bodies, the skeletal survivors — revealed the scale of the horror to the world. Since 2005, the UN General Assembly has marked 27 January as International Day of Commemoration in Memory of the Victims of the Holocaust.
After the liberation, the survivors and the Polish state wanted the world not to forget what had happened. In 1947, the Polish parliament created the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, with the mission of preserving the site, conserving the objects and the installations, carrying out research and, above all, educating. The Memorial does not seek spectacle: its tone is sober and rigorous, because its purpose is memory and passing on a warning to future generations.
In 1979, UNESCO inscribed the site on the World Heritage List. Its official name is deliberately precise: 'Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp (1940-1945)'. That wording — stressing that it was 'German Nazi' — matters: the camp was built and operated by Nazi Germany on the territory of occupied Poland, and the Polish authorities have insisted on rejecting the mistaken expression 'Polish extermination camps'. The site is on the list as a unique testimony to one of the greatest crimes against humanity.
Why visit? Because, as the survivors have repeated, seeing with your own eyes the railway tracks, the barracks, the victims' belongings and the ruins of the gas chambers conveys an understanding no book can give, and because memory is a form of responsibility. In a world where antisemitism, racism and Holocaust denial have not disappeared, keeping the memory of Auschwitz alive is an ethical commitment. You visit in silence and with respect, not as a tourist but as a witness: to remember those who were murdered and so that something like this never happens again.