Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

What to expect

For most international travellers the Auschwitz Museum is a day trip from Krakow, and it fills the day. The Memorial in Oświęcim spans two former camps 3.5 km apart: Auschwitz I, the brick-built main camp, and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, the open expanse of the railway ramp, barracks and gas chamber ruins. Around 1.1 million people were murdered here, the overwhelming majority of them Jews, alongside Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

Most individual travellers who take a guide join a language tour: a scheduled educator-led group for individual travellers, joined by buying a single place, with a headset so you can hear the educator in a crowd. Nine in ten of the more than 1.95 million people who came in 2025 chose a tour with an educator.

English tours run as often as Polish ones - every 15 minutes in July and August, hourly in winter - so English speakers rarely have to plan around one slot. French, German, Spanish and Italian run once to three times a day and Russian on most days; Czech, Slovak and Ukrainian appear only in some months.

Every tour starts at Auschwitz I, where the blocks hold documents, photographs, the belongings taken from deportees and a dozen or so national exhibitions. A shuttle then takes the group to Birkenau. The tour runs about 3.5 hours; add 30 minutes for the security check and the journey from Krakow and back, and there is no room for a second sight.

Do not settle for Auschwitz I alone: Birkenau is where the scale of the camp becomes visible, and in the museum’s own words, “It is essential to visit both parts of the camp”. The museum does not recommend visits by children under 14.

Before you set off, check the museum’s notices. Parts of Birkenau and individual national exhibitions close temporarily, and the whole site can shut for a few hours during state visits and ceremonies.

Tips

• Book online, nowhere else. Since 1 March 2026 every pass, free or paid, comes from visit.auschwitz.org; the only one handed out on the day is a disabled visitor’s carer pass. If a Krakow tour company sells you a trip without a pass in your name, you will not get in.
• First time? Take the tour. One visitor who went alone writes that the self-guided route needs good preparation, or you end up feeling lost. The free pass suits people who have read about the camp or are coming back.
• A tour place costs 140 PLN. With a headset it is 140 PLN in Polish and 150 PLN in another language; concessions (school pupils and students under 26, over-75s, disabled visitors) pay 130 and 140 PLN. A disabled visitor’s carer joins free, collecting the pass on the day at the visitor service desk or arranging it by e-mail.
• Last-minute tour places exist. Online sales for a language tour stay open until 15 minutes before it starts, as long as seats remain. Still, the museum advises booking guides one to two months ahead.
• Free passes open 90 days out. They are released daily at 12:00 noon, 90 days ahead, and close 7 days before the date or when the pool runs out. Once booked, an individual pass cannot be refunded or moved.
• Free passes mean late afternoon. You enter from 17:00 between April and September, 16:00 in March and October, 15:00 in February, 14:00 in January and November and 13:00 in December. The museum suggests at least 90 minutes for each part, so budget three hours.
• Arrive 30 minutes early, in proper shoes. Security comes before the gate, the time on your pass is binding, and bags over 35 x 25 x 15 cm go to the visitor centre’s left-luggage room. Birkenau is gravel, grass and uneven ground, muddy after rain, with no shelter from sun or rain.
• For a second visit. The six-hour study tour costs 180 PLN, or 190 PLN in another language (concession 160 and 170 PLN). It adds selected national exhibitions and the area known as “Kanada”.

Getting there

Oświęcim is about 50 km west of Krakow as the crow flies, and the Memorial sits on the edge of town on regional road 933. Kraków-Balice and Katowice-Pyrzowice airports are both a few dozen kilometres away.

Coach: Lajkonik coaches from Krakow pull into the museum car park itself, the least complicated option for a day trip. PKS buses and minibuses from Krakow and Katowice stop nearby.

Train: Oświęcim station is about 1,500 m from the main entrance, roughly a 20-minute walk, with a multi-storey Park & Ride beside it. Check the timetable before you go and fit the walk into your 30-minute margin.

Car: take the A4 motorway, then road 933. The museum recommends turning into Więźniów Oświęcimia Street from Legionów Street. The museum’s car park at the former Auschwitz I camp is free, and the one at the former Auschwitz II-Birkenau camp is a paid municipal car park; the main one and the visitor centre are at no. 55.

Between Auschwitz I and Birkenau: the museum runs a free shuttle, which its tour page describes as intended for visitors on language tours. A visitor blog puts it at every 10 to 15 minutes and about five minutes’ ride. Walking the 3.5 km is possible along town streets, but the route passes an industrial area.

Nearby

Staying the night in Oświęcim? The Castle Museum in Oświęcim in the town centre shows what the town was before 1940, Jewish community included. Give it 90 minutes, on the following morning rather than the same day.

Back in Krakow, three museums prepare the ground. The Galicia Jewish Museum in Kazimierz covers pre-war Jewish life in the region. Oskar Schindler’s Enamel Factory and the Eagle Pharmacy , in the former ghetto in Podgórze, document the occupation. Seen in that order before your trip, they give the day in Oświęcim its context.

For a longer memorial route across Poland, the usual second stop is the State Museum at Majdanek in Lublin. It is the other large camp memorial preserved on its original ground.

Background

The suitcases, shoes and prisoner clothing on display in the blocks are a small part of a collection of more than 100,000 objects, kept alongside the camp archive that survived the evacuation. Across both sites, over 150 buildings and about 300 ruins remain on roughly 200 hectares.

Piotr Cywiński has directed the museum since 2006. It was founded by an act of the Polish parliament on 2 July 1947, and in 1979 UNESCO inscribed the site as the one representing all concentration and extermination camps.

Attendance tells its own story. The record was 2.32 million in 2019; the pandemic cut it to 502,000 in 2020; 2025 brought 1.95 million, seven percent more than the year before. Poles made up 23 percent, followed by visitors from the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain, Germany and the United States. The museum’s 340 educators work in 20 languages.