Auschwitz-Birkenau: How to Visit

In 2025, more than 2.3 million people visited Auschwitz-Birkenau. That number deserves a moment of reflection: it means the site is doing something important, generating attention and engagement with history that resists forgetting. It also means that visiting requires planning, and that visiting without a guide leaves most people significantly under-prepared for what they’re looking at.

Auschwitz-Birkenau is the largest and most systematically documented site of the Nazi concentration and extermination camp system. Between 1941 and 1945, approximately 1.1 million people were murdered here, the majority of them Jewish men, women, and children brought from across occupied Europe. The scale of the operation, the bureaucratic precision with which it was administered, and the physical evidence that survived liberation by Soviet forces on January 27, 1945, make this the most documented genocide in history. That documentation is what you come to understand.

Planning Your Visit

As of March 2026, on-site ticket sales have been permanently discontinued. All visits, including the free individual entry passes and paid guided tours, must be booked in advance online at visit.auschwitz.org. This is the only legitimate booking source.

Admission to the Memorial grounds is free. Official guided tours cost 150 PLN per person (approximately €35). Guided tours are strongly recommended: the site is large, the exhibits are dense, and the experience of having a guide who can contextualise what you’re seeing transforms a walk through historical remains into a structured account of what happened and how.

The Memorial is open every day of the year except January 1, December 25, and Easter Sunday. Arrive at least 30 minutes before your booked time for security checks. Visits to the site are not recommended for children under 14.

What You Will See

Auschwitz I, the original camp in Oswiecim, contains the preserved barracks buildings now housing exhibition rooms with artefacts: thousands of pairs of shoes, eyeglasses, suitcases, and children’s clothing confiscated from victims. One exhibition room holds nearly two tonnes of human hair. These physical collections make the scale of the murder concrete in a way that statistics alone cannot.

Auschwitz II-Birkenau, 3km from Auschwitz I (a shuttle bus connects them), is the much larger site where the majority of the killing took place. The ruins of the gas chambers and crematoria destroyed by the SS before liberation, the vast field of barracks ruins, and the railway line that runs directly to the site of the ramp where selection took place on arrival: the physical scale of Birkenau is different from anything at Auschwitz I and should not be skipped.

Getting There

Oswiecim is 65km from Krakow. Train and bus connections from Krakow take 1.5-2 hours. Most visitors stay in Krakow and make a day trip: the journey is manageable and Krakow’s old town (Wawel Castle, the main market square, the Kazimierz Jewish quarter) offers the historical context for understanding what Poland was before the occupation. For dinner in Krakow, the restaurants around Kazimierz offer traditional Polish cooking at prices considerably below Warsaw equivalents.