Auschwitz-Birkenau
The extermination camp, kept as it was, ninety minutes up the road.
Duration
4 hrs – 6 hrs
Best time
First slot of the day
Open
Every day
Entry price
Free
Auschwitz I was a Polish barracks converted into a concentration camp in 1940; Birkenau, three kilometres away, was built in 1941 as an extermination camp. Around one million one hundred thousand people were murdered here, a million of them Jews.
The two sites are visited together and a shuttle links them. Auschwitz I is a museum inside the brick blocks — the confiscated belongings, the hair, the suitcases with names on them. Birkenau is left almost bare: the selection ramp, the wooden barracks, the ruins of the gas chambers dynamited by the SS before they fled. It is the scale of the place that strikes you.
Getting there
Seventy kilometres west of Kraków, an hour and a half by bus from the coach station. A shuttle links Auschwitz I to Birkenau.
Hours
Online booking is compulsory, even for free entry
Rules on site
Entry is free but booking a slot is compulsory, online, and places go weeks ahead. Between ten and three the visit must be guided, and that is charged. It is a memorial: sober dress and conduct, and no photography in certain rooms.