HOURS OF OPERATION

8:00 AM - 3:00 PM December through February 
8:00 AM - 4:00 PM March and November
8:00 AM - 5:00 PM April and October
8:00 AM - 6:00 PM May and September 
8:00 AM - 7:00 PM June, July, and August 

These are the hours for visiting the site of the camp. The office of the Former Prisoners' Information Section, Archives, Collections, Library, Administration, and other departments are open from 8:00 AM-2:00 PM, Monday through Friday (except holidays). The Museum may also be closed temporarily during official state visits, ceremonies, etc. The Museum is open, but does not offer guide service on the days of mass public events as announced in the media. The Museum is closed on January 1, December 25, and Easter Sunday. To date, over 25,000,000 people 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).

ACCESSIBILITY AND LOCATION

After the reapportionment of the Polish administrative system in 1999, City of Oswiecim (population at over 40,000) has become part of Malopolska province (provincial capital: Krakow / Cracow). The city is situated in the Oswiecim Basin, geographically a part of Upper Silesia. Three large cities lie less than a hundred kilometers of Oswiecim: the mining and industrial center of Katowice, the hub of the Polish automotive industry in Bielsko Biala, and the pearl of Polish cities, Cracow (pop. 700,000, home of the Jagiellonian University, founded in the fourteenth century and the oldest Polish university).

City of Katowice and City of Cracow both have international airports with connections to Europe and the rest of the world. The whole region enjoys frequent railroad and bus service, and a dense road network. This allows unhampered access to Oswiecim by private car or public transport (click here for air travel info).

PLANNING YOUR VISIT AND TOUR

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 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. 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.

PERSONAL GUIDES

Only guides licensed by the Museum are authorized to assist visitors.  Visitors arriving in small or large 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 tour 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 Information Center.

Guides (there are more than 150 of them) are available to serve visitors in the following languages: Croatian, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Spanish, and Swedish (if your language is not listed here, contact the Museum for other availability) .

Guide services may be reserved 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.  These are direct phone numbers for the Auschwitz Museum in Oswiecim, Poland. Outside of these times, you may use (+4833) 844 81 02 during the Museum's opening hours or by sending a fax to (+4833) 843 22 27.  Guides may also be arranged in person at the Visitor Reception Point in 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. 

According to your needs, visitors may engage a guide for a standard tour (up to 3.5 hours), specialist visit (6 hours), or a two-day visit. A fee is charged for guide services. (click here for a list of available tours)

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.

AVAILABLE TOURS AT THE MUSEUM

The Museum offers several different ways for school groups, organized tour groups, pilgrims, study groups, and individual visitors to become familiar with the history of the concentration camp. Each variant includes tours of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, conducted by a licensed Museum guide.*

1. General/Standard tour (up to three-and-a-half hours in duration):

the permanent exhibition at Auschwitz I Main Camp and the site of the Main Camp;
the most important remaining camp objects at Birkenau : the site of the camp, residential barracks, the unloading ramp , the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria II and III;

2. One-day study tours (approximately six hours in duration):

general tour of the site of the Auschwitz I Main Camp supplemented by special emphasis on the elements of the permanent exhibition devoted to the destruction of the Jews (Block No. 27) and the Poles (Block No. 15);
general tour of the site of the Birkenau camp supplemented by special emphasis on selected objects associated with the mass destruction of the Jews (the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria IV and V, "Kanada," the "Sauna" building, or Bunker No. 2)

3. Two-day study tours** (total duration of tours approximately 8 hours):

first day: specialized (study) tour of the permanent exhibition in Auschwitz I and the site of the Main Camp ;
second day: survey of living conditions in Birkenau Concentration Camp (barracks, washrooms, latrines), survey of selected sites associated with the mass destruction of the Jews in Birkenau (the unloading ramp , the ruins of gas chambers and crematoria IV and V, "Kanada," the "Sauna" building, or Bunker No. 2)

* A fee is charged for guide services (for a complete list of fees click here).
** Organizers/visitors should make arrangements for lodging.

BRIEF HISTORY ABOUT THE CITY OF OSWIECIM IN POLAND

The city was first mentioned in 1117. In 1179 it was detached from the Kraków senior province and attached to the Duchy of Opole. Oświęcim was organized under German law (more precisely Lwówek law, which is a flavor of Magdeburg law) in 1270. Throughout history, Germans and Poles lived here together peacefully. From 1315 Oświęcim was the capital of an independent duchy. In 1327 duke John I of Oświęcim formed with the western part of Galicia and the duchies of Oświęcim and Zator a vassal state attached to the kingdom of Bohemia. Later the area went again to the dukes from Te and Grossglogau. In the 14th century many people moved away. The interest of the Germans in Auschwitz shrank and in 1457 the Polish king Casimir IV bought the rights to Oświęcim which was attached afterwards the Cracow Voivodeship. Jews, invited by Polish kings to settle in the region, had already become the majority of the population in the 15th century. Oświęcim also became one of centres of Protestant culture in Poland.

The town was destroyed by Swedish troops in 1655. When Poland was divided in the late 18th century, Oświęcim became part of the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria (an Austro-Hungarian province) in 1772 and was located close to the borders of Russia and Prussia. After World War I the town returned to Poland with that country's reemergence as an independent nation. On the eve of World War II there were about 8,000 Jews in the City.

During the Nazi occupation of Poland, slave labour was used to build a new subdivision that would house concentration camp guards and others that moved to Oświęcim to run the Auschwitz death camps. The prisoners of Auschwitz were also used to build a large chemical works, Buna-Werke, for I.G. Farben, which produced many different chemicals needed for Germany's war effort.¹

¹ SOURCE: WIKIPEDIA.ORG - THANK YOU WIKIPEDIA

ACCOMODATIONS IN THE CITY OF OSWIECIM / AUSCHWITZ

Hotel GLOBE in Oswiecim

address : 32-600 Oswiecim, ul. Powstanców Slaskich 16
telephone : +48 33 8430643, 8430632
fax : +48 33 8430643, 8430632
number of beds :120 beds in single, double, and triple rooms with bathrooms and telephones, as well as in suites. Conference room.
restaurant: open to the public, seats 60
parking : supervised, on the hotel grounds
Internet: http://www.poltravel.com/cities/auschwitz_frm.htm
information : The hotel accepts telephone reservations, accepts credit cards, located approximately 2.5 kilometers from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum. TV room, billiards room, and pub annexed to restaurant are available to guests.

"OLIMPIJSKI" Hotel in Oswiecim

address : 32-600 Oswiecim, ul. Chemików 2a
telephone : +48 33 8423842
fax : +48 33 8474194
number of beds : 50 in single and double rooms and in single and double suites with bathroom, telephone, and satellite TV.
restaurant: seats 40, open to the
parking : supervised, adjacent to hotel
Internet : http://www.poltravel.com/cities/auschwitz_frm.htm
information : Hotel accepts telephone reservations. Hotel complex is located in wooded grounds approximately 100 meters from the Dwory chemical works (the former IG Farben plant), 100 meters from the bus station, 2 kilometers from the center of the city and 5 kilometers from the Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

Hotel "KAMIENIEC" in Oswiecim

address : 32-600 Oswiecim, ul. Zajazdowa 2
telephone : +48 33 8432564
fax : +48 33 8432564
Internet: http://www.poltravel.com/cities/auschwitz_frm.htm
number of beds : 50 beds in 1-, 2-, 3-, 4-person rooms
restaurant : seats 40, open to the public
parking : supervised, adjacent to hotel
information : Telephone reservations accepted, situated 3 kilometers from Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum.

Certain content on this page Copyright 1999-2007 © Panstwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau
Certain content on this page Copyright 2006-2010 © Authors at WIKIPEDIA.ORG

AUSCHWITZ SITE MENU
Introduction | History & Facts |  Timeline | Auschwitz & Birkenau Photography | Experiments | Survivors | Maps | Glossary | Visiting Auschwitz | Organizations | Auschwitz Travel Info | Warsaw City Guide | Krakow City Guide | Advertise Here | Contact Us | LukeTravels.com Home Page

Auschwitz/Birkenau contents Copyright © LukeTravels.com unless otherwise noted. Special thanks to those who have contributed to this site. Click here for [Legal Info]. Reproduction permitted for educational use only, but must obtain permission via out contact page. Auschwitz/Birkenau Exhibition at LukeTravels.com is based in Chicago, IL USA. This site last updated on November 17, 2014.