auschwitz birkenau tour time

Basic information

•  Admission  to the grounds of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial is free of charge. The entry cards should be reserved on visit.auschwitz.org . For better understanding the history of Auschwitz we suggest a visit with an guide-educator

• The fees are charged for guided tours. Visitors in groups are required to engage an Auschwitz Memorial guide.  There is also possibility  for individual visitors to join a guided tour . 

• The Museum also organizes  online guided tours   for groups and individual visitors.

• While on the grounds of the Museum, you are required to observe the appropriate solemnity and respect. Before the visit please read " the rules for visiting ".

• Due to overwhelming demand, please book in advance and arrive at the Memorial at least 30 minutes before the start of the tour due to security checks. The main car park and entrance to the Museum is located at  55 Więźniów Oświęcimia Street .

• The grounds and buildings of the Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau camps are open to visitors. The duration of a visit is determined solely by the individual interests and needs of the visitors. As a minimum, however, at least three-and-a-half hours should be reserved.

• The maximum size of backpacks or handbags brought into the Museum does not exceed dimensions: 35x25x15 cm.

• Visitors may leave their luggage in paid luggage storage. The dimensions of the luggage storages expressed in centimeters are 90x50x22, 60x50x22 and 85x65x42, internal dimensions are: 90x50x30, 60x50x30 and 90x65x50, and their maximum load is 30 kg.

Taking pictures  on the grounds of the State Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau in Oświęcim for own purposes, without use of a flash and stands, is allowed for exceptions to a room with the hair of Victims (Block 4) and the basements of Block 11. Material may be used only in undertakings and projects that do not violate the good name of the Victims of Auschwitz. Photography and filming on the Museum grounds for commercial purposes, at spaces closed to visitors or with a drone , require prior approval by the Museum.

• Guides . Visitors in groups are required to engage an Auschwitz Memorial guide; individual visitors may also  engage a guide-educator . For them we offer  organized tours .
• Groups of more than 10 people  are required to hire a headphone guiding system.
• Disabled . Because of the need to preserve the historical authenticity of the site of the Memorial it may be difficult for dissabled persons to move around the grounds and buildings. In order to help visitors with disabilities wheelchairs are available free of charge at the Visitor Service Centre. More information...
• It is not recommended  that children under 14 visit the Memorial

While on the grounds of the Museum,  you are required to observe  the appropriate solemnity  and respect.

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Images from www.auschwitz.org may be used only in publications relating to the history of the German Nazi concentration and extermination camp Auschwitz-Birkenau or the activities of the Auschwitz Memorial. Their use must not tarnish the good reputation of the victims of KL Auschwitz. Any interference in the integrity of the images – including cropping or graphic processing – is prohibited. The use of the images for commercial purposes requires the Museum’s approval and information about the publication. Publishers undertake to indicate the authors and origin of the images: www.auschwitz.org, as well as to inform the Museum of the use of the images ([email protected]).

Select the type of the visit

Due to the March of the Living on May 6, the Museum will be closed to visitors

IMPORTANT NOTICE: The only official website with entry cards to visit the Auschwitz Museum is visit.auschwitz.org. The Museum is not responsible for bookings made on any other sites

In order to enter the Auschwitz Memorial all visitors, also those coming in organized groups, must have their personalized entry pass and ID with them. All guided tours start at former camp Auschwitz I.

Copyright © 2014 Państwowe Muzeum Auschwitz-Birkenau. All rights reserved

- Informationen für Besucher der Gedenkstätte

Kurz nach der Befreiung des KZ Auschwitz begannen Überlebende damit, Zeugnisse aus dem Lagerleben zu sichern. Am 2. Juli 1947 erließ das polnische Parlament ein Gesetz zur Bewahrung des Geländes "für alle Zeiten". Zugleich wurde das staatliche Museum Auschwitz-Birkenau ins Leben gerufen. 

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Im Jahr 2018 konnte die Gedenkstätte Auschwitz-Birkenau einen neuen Besucherrekord verzeichen: 2,15 Millionen Menschen besuchten das ehemalige deutsche Vernichtungslager.

Mehr als dreiviertel der Gäste kommen aus dem Ausland, wobei die Besucher aus Deutschland nur an sechster Stelle stehen.

Die Gedenkstätte des ehemaligen deutschen Konzentrations- und Vernichtungslagers Auschwitz-Birkenau befindet sich in der südpolnischen Stadt Oświęcim, etwa 50 Kilometer westlich von Krakau entfernt. Seit 1979 steht die Gedenkstätte auf der Liste des UNESCO-Weltkulturerbes.

Das 192 Hektar große Gelände umfasst das ehemalige Hauptlager Auschwitz und das Vernichtungslager Auschwitz-Birkenau mit insgesamt etwa 150 Gebäuden und rund 300 Ruinen. 

Interessierte können einen Großteil der Originalobjekte der ehemaligen Lager Auschwitz I und Auschwitz II-Birkenau sowie die Dauerausstellung besichtigen, die den Prozess der Vernichtung im Konzentrationslager dokumentiert. Die Orte der ersten und zweiten Gaskammer in Birkenau, die Eisenbahnrampe, an der die Transporte der Deportierten ankamen, sowie das Massengrab der Häftlinge sind als Teil der Gedenkstätte ebenfalls zugänglich.

Der nächstgelegene internationale Flughafen zur Gedenkstätte Auschwitz-Birkenau ist Krakau-Balice. Die Fahrt mit der Bahn von Berlin  nach Oświęcim dauert rund 10 Stunden. Weitere Informationen über bahn.de . Von Deutschland aus empfiehlt sich per Auto eine Anreise über die Autobahn A 4 (E 40) via Wroclaw (Breslau) und Kattowitz. Entfernung von Berlin: knapp 550 Kilometer.

Täglich geöffnet von:

Dez - Feb 8 - 15 Uhr Mär u. Nov 8 - 16 Uhr Apr u. Okt 8 - 17 Uhr Mai u. Sept 8 - 18 Uhr Jun - Aug 8 - 19 Uhr

Öffnungszeiten

Die Öffnungszeiten betreffen das Gelände des ehemaligen Lagers. Das Büro für Informationen über ehemalige Häftlinge, die Bibliothek, die Verwaltung und andere Abteilungen sind (abgesehen von Feiertagen) von Montag bis Freitag zwischen 7 und 15 Uhr geöffnet. Am 1. Januar, 25. Dezember und Ostersonntag ist das Museum geschlossen.

Eintritt und Besucherdienst

Der Eintritt in die Gedenkstätte Auschwitz-Birkenau ist kostenlos. Für die Besichtigung des Geländes und der Ausstellung wird empfohlen, mindestens dreieinhalb Stunden einzuplanen.

Die Entfernung zwischen Auschwitz I und Auschwitz II-Birkenau (3 km) kann zu Fuß zurückgelegt werden. Außerdem gibt es einen Shuttle-Bus, der regelmäßig zwischen den ehemaligen Lagern Auschwitz I und Auschwitz II-Birkenau verkehrt.

Optimale Information und historische Erklärungen gewährleisten die Führungen, die die Mitarbeiter des Besucherdienstes anbieten.

Bei geführten Besuchen kann zwischen einer Standardführung (dreieinhalb Stunden), einer eintägigen Studienführung (sechs Stunden) und einer zweitägigen Studienführung gewählt werden. Die Standardführung für Einzelpersonen kostet: - polnisch 50 Zloty (ca. 11,70 Euro); ermäßigt 45 Zloty (ca. 10,50 Euro) - deutsch & andere Sprachen 60 Zloty (ca. 14 Euro); ermäßigt 55 Zloty (12,90 Euro) Bei Gruppenführungen variieren die Preise je nach Länge und Personenanzahl.

Anmeldungen zu den Führungen:

- per Email: [email protected] - telefonisch: +48 33 844 8100 (montags bis freitags 7 - 15 Uhr oder unter + 48 33 843 2227) - vor Ort am Anmeldeschalter für Besucher*innen

Aufgrund der großen Nachfrage wird empfohlen, eine Führung rechtzeitig zu reservieren. Die Führungen sind kostenpflichtig.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Tours

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1 Day Trip Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum Guided Tour from Krakow

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Auschwitz-Birkenau Tours - All You Need to Know BEFORE You Go (2024)

• French Education

At Auschwitz-Birkenau, pupils from a Paris suburb face the memory of the Holocaust

Time to 7 min. Lire en français

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Feature At the end of February, middle schoolers traveled to Krakow and Auschwitz in an effort to raise awareness of the genocide and prevent anti-Semitism.

Up until then, it had been a school trip like any other: Pupils from the Romain-Rolland middle school in Clichy-sous-Bois, a suburb east of Paris, were filming the outskirts of Krakow through the bus window with their smartphones, sharing sweets and laughing. Then, all of a sudden, something grabbed their attention. An icy whisper, like a breath, silenced their conversations. Outside, on the right, they had just seen the infamous silhouette of the Birkenau watchtower appear in the misty morning. "It's huge," whispered Nazim.

This study trip to Krakow and Auschwitz-Birkenau, organized at the end of February by the Holocaust Memorial in partnership with the French department of Seine-Saint-Denis, was the first of its kind for middle schoolers in that department, with the aim of raising awareness of the memory of genocide and preventing anti-Semitism. Usually, it's the high schools that send their pupils. France's school curricula provide for studying the Holocaust on three occasions: in the last year of primary school, in the last year of middle school, and in the penultimate year of high school (optionally, in vocational schools).

On the eve of departure, in a classroom at the middle school, no one spoke a word, apart from Nazim, who was particularly interested in the subject. His teachers later admitted, a little worried, that he had rushed to watch Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List (1993) and Roman Polanski's The Pianist (2002), alone at home. "I'm going to have to calm him down a bit, these are difficult images for a young person of his age," said Carole Couderc, the history teacher who spearheaded the project. "As we're not there to debrief with him, it can be complicated."

Most of the students found it hard to imagine what they were going to see. Their teacher took over, talking with them about local places of remembrance they'd already visited, such as the Shoah Memorial in Drancy, the internment camp near Paris from where Jews were deported to extermination camps during World War II. The history syllabus includes a study "wars of annihilation" in the broadest sense, by comparing the genocide of Jews with other events where hatred led to the worst.

Double logic

During the two-day trip, the teachers sought to create an encounter between a group of children from immigrant backgrounds and the memory of a Europe their grandparents never knew, seeing as the overwhelming majority of them came from former French colonies such as Algeria or Senegal.

Over the course of the trip, the history teacher returned several times to the twofold method that drives her: to approach the memory of the genocide through knowledge, but also through her pupils' own experiences. In other words, the history of their region – Seine-Saint-Denis having been the departure point for most deportees from France – and their own personal family history. "Teachers have often been criticized for taking a compassionate approach to the genocide of the Jews," said Couderc. "Like many of us, I learned about the Holocaust by looking at images of emaciated bodies in history class. But what do we retain in terms of knowledge? I'm teaching them to take a historian's approach, based on facts, but they're also teenagers, and a teenager is a whole: a pupil, a citizen, an individual, with his or her own history and sensibility."

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Auschwitz ii-birkenau, in the neighborhood.

• Auschwitz I
• Oprowadzanie zdalne PE MCEAH
• Auschwitz-Birkenau - Alte Judenrampe
• Main camp gate
• Camp unloading ramp
• Camp unloading platform
• Camp unloading ramp - a bird's eye view
• Blockfuehrerstube (SS administration building)
• Makeshift gas chamber - so-called 'little red house'
• Road to makeshift gas chamber - so-called 'little white house'
• Makeshift gas chamber - so-called 'little white house'
• Field containing human ashes
• Ruins of gas chamber and crematorium II
• Ruins of gas chamber and crematorium III
• Ruins of gas chamber and crematorium IV
• Ruins of gas chamber and crematorium V
• Pond containing human ashes
• Storage area - so-called 'Canada'
• Storage area - so-called 'Canada' - a bird's eye view
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Undressing room
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Looted property
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Disinfection facilities
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Barber's room
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Showers
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Latrine
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Family photograhps of deportees
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Family photographs of deportees
• Main camp baths - so-called 'Sauna' building. Cart used to transport human ashes
• Monument - a bird's eye view
• Monument - ceremony of the anniversary of liberation
• Monument of murdered Soviet POWs
• View from a watchtower
• Road between sectors BII and BIII - a bird's eye view
• Middle road
• Sector BIa - women's camp
• Road between sectors BIa and BIb
• Between BIa and BIb sectors
• Block 25 in sector Bia
• Brick barracks
• Children's barracks
• Sector BIIa - men's quarantine
• Jews from Theresienstadt camp - BIIb
• Sector BIIc - transit camp
• Sector BIId - men's camp
• Sinti and Roma camp - BIIe
• Sector BIIe - Sinti and Roma Monument
• Camp hospital
• Wooden prisoners' barracks
• Camp latrines
• Road between sectors BII and BIII
• Sector BIII - so-called 'Mexico'
• Sewage plant
• March of the Living 2013
• March of the Living 2014

• Entertainment

The Story Behind Peacock’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz

F ive years after Heather Morris’s 2017 novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz topped the New York Times ’ paperback fiction list , a limited series of the same name will stream on Peacock starting today (May 2).

The novel and six-episode series both center on the story of a real-life Auschwitz prisoner, Lali Sokolov, whom the Nazis forced to tattoo identifying numbers on to fellow inmates. Yet amid the hellscape of the concentration camp , he met the love of his life, Gita Furman, and they married when the war was over. Sokolov, who died in 2006, told his story to Morris over the course of three years when he was in his 80s and 90s, and the novel and show are inspired by those conversations.

While the show and novel are billed as based on a true story, there are questions about how accurate the story really is. In a 2018 article, published in a magazine produced by the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, one of its research center staffers, Wanda Witek-Malicka, laid out what the novel gets right and wrong about the camp experience. TIME talked to the showrunners, Director Tali Shalom-Ezer and Executive Producer Claire Mundell, about the historical research they did for the show, and Witek-Malicka about why it’s especially important that TV shows and novels based on the Holocaust contain believable situations.

What we know and don’t know about the real tattooist of Auschwitz

Witek-Malicka confirms that Lali Sokolov was a real tattooist and prisoner at Auschwitz in Poland, Nazi Germany’s largest concentration and extermination camp . He arrived on April 23, 1942, from Slovakia and was given the number 32407. It is true that he tattooed identifying numbers onto incoming inmates. It is true that he fell in love with Gita Furman and they lived happily ever after. But Witek-Malicka says the descriptions of how the camp works and the layout are inaccurate. Despite a moving scene in the Peacock show depicting Gita and Lali’s first meeting when he tattoos a number on her arm, Witek-Malicka says that could not have happened in real life because men tattooed male inmates and women tattooed female inmates.

Witek-Malicka takes issue with the way that Morris largely relied on Sokolov’s testimony. She argues the novel should have better reflected the latest academic literature on the camp and the documents in the archives of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. But as Morris told the New York Times in 2018, “The book does not claim to be an academic historical piece of nonfiction, I’ll leave that to the academics and historians.”

The real history behind Peacock’s The Tattooist of Auschwitz

The showrunners knew about Witek-Malicka’s article, and worked to make details in the show more accurate. For example, they did not use Gita’s number in the novel, 34902, and instead used 4562, the number she mentioned in her testimony to USC’s Shoah Foundation. In the novel, Lali tries to find penicillin for Gita, but the medication wasn’t widely accessible until after the war, so the show calls the medicine an antimicrobial. And the show makes it clear that Sokolov was one of several tattooists, and not the only one like the novel suggests.

To depict the camp layout more accurately, production staffers made trips to Auschwitz; Mundell, an executive producer, says she personally went there six times. Because Witek-Malicka warned about the danger of relying on one survivor’s memory, the production hired documentary filmmaker Naomi Gryn to watch survivor testimonies, find prisoners’ drawings, liaise with libraries and museums around the world like the Imperial War Museum in London, and put out queries to the Auschwitz museum.

Still, the filmmakers say the show is based primarily on Sokolov’s recollections. As director Shalom-Ezer tells TIME, “ultimately the history that we're telling is Lali’s history. We believe Lali. We're going to tell his memory, exactly the way that he described it.”

The power of period dramas

So to what extent should historical fiction be historically accurate ? Witek-Malicka believes writers of historical fiction have a responsibility to portray history accurately for readers who may only learn about the past through from historical fiction and period dramas.

Mundell hopes the show will “encourage people to educate themselves” and read more about Auschwitz and Holocaust history after seeing the show. It’s true, as Witek-Malicka writes in her article, that Sokolov and Furman’s experience was an anomaly.

In the afterward for The Tattooist of Auschwitz novel, the couple’s son Gary Sokolov details how the Auschwitz experience affected his parents later in life. He said his mother always picked four-leaf and five-leaf leaf clovers because she said prisoners who gave them to German soldiers would receive extra portions of soup and bread. His father, Lali, said he couldn’t cry anymore after seeing death on such a mass scale—until the death of his wife in 2003. His parents were serious about making sure he learned the full history of the Holocaust , describing how they made him watch a TV series The World at War when he was 13 years old. He says they openly talked about their experience in Auschwitz, but could not sit and watch the series with him because it was too painful.

For Sokolov, telling his story to Morris was a kind of therapy. In the show, ghosts of Nazi soldiers haunt him in his apartment. Shalom-Ezer hopes that will raise awareness of how the Holocaust still affects survivors today . As she puts it, “one misconception I would want to debunk would be that when the camps were liberated that everyone lived happily ever after. Trauma is a lifelong burden to carry for the survivors. This isn't a history lesson from the past. This is something that's very much alive.”

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‘The Tattooist of Auschwitz’ is both love story and reminder of the Holocaust and its horrors

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“This is a love story,” says Lali Sokolov (Harvey Keitel) at the beginning of “The Tattooist of Auschwitz,” as a caveat, or perhaps a come-on — not your usual Holocaust tale, then, that we’re about to begin. (Though there will be plenty of the usual, as well.)

The memories of real-life survivor Sokolov (played by Keitel old, and Jonah Hauer-King young) became the basis of a 2018 novel by New Zealand writer Heather Morris, who interviewed him over three years with an eye to writing a screenplay. The novel it became sold many copies and topped the New York Times bestseller list — no better guarantee of a picture deal — and sits on a shelf among similarly titled volumes, including “The Librarian of Auschwitz,” “The Midwife of Auschwitz,” “The Dressmakers of Auschwitz,” “The Last Boy in Auschwitz,” “The Sisters of Auschwitz,” “The Redhead of Auschwitz” and “Lovers in Auschwitz.” Apparently the story of Lali and Gita Sokolov wasn’t unique.

In this television telling, premiering Thursday on Peacock and soberly directed by Israeli filmmaker Tali Shalom-Ezer ( “Princess” ), novice writer Morris ( Melanie Lynskey ) becomes a character, deposing Lali at his request; he wants to get his story out. The action alternates between scenes of their meetings and the story he’s telling her. Though we spend much more time in the past, the series is as much about the recent business as the distant one.

In 1942, Lali, a Slovakian Jew, is sent to the expanding concentration camp at Auschwitz-Birkenau where, after a period of disorientation, he is put to work tattooing serial numbers on the forearms of new prisoners. The job affords him some comforts — greater freedom of movement, his own room — even as it puts him in danger. “You are working for the SS now,” says SS officer Stefan Baretzki (Jonas Nay), his manager. “You will need protection. Trust me.”

Lali is at work one day in the women’s camp when up steps Gita (Anna Próchniak). It is love at first sight for both.

“Your eyes, are they blue?” she asks him. (Close up on Lali’s eyes.)

“Sometimes.”

“Today, they look like the sky.”

(Then she asks if she can get her tattoo in pink.)

We know from the start, obviously, that Lali will survive; Gita’s fate isn’t explicitly stated until the end of the third episode. (“I did wonder when you would tell me,” Heather tells Lali). That she survived as well is not a spoiler; it’s been stated in every press release and promotional posting. There are other characters whose fate remains uncertain, though with a couple of exceptions we invest in them as a class, rather than as individuals. The spotlight is on our couple and to some extent on Baretzki, who, by action or inaction, makes their difficult liaison possible — because, seemingly, he cares for Lali.

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In one extraordinary moment, the SS officer, drunk and disheveled, holds Lali (who is concerned for the health of an ailing Gita) and coos, “We’ll get through this. I’m here for you.”

Baretzki and other ghosts haunt modern-day Lali; they sit beside him on his couch, look over his shoulder, watch from across the room, questioning his memory as he speaks to Heather. Lali is an ordinary unreliable narrator in that he’s digging out things that happened some 60 years before; but there are also things he has protectively buried and isn’t ready to face. Interludes in which the accusing faces of prisoners silently fill the frame act as a sort of externalization of his survivor’s guilt. These are useful dramatic devices, but repeated over a six-hour series, they do start to feel a little pat, even cheesy.

If”The Tattooist” doesn’t quite register as an Uplifting Testament to the Power of the Human Spirit — to its credit, I’d say — it’s an honorable project, honorably made, moving at times, horrifying at others, in broad strokes and small details. (“After the shower there will be coffee and rolls,” we hear a guard tell a new group of prisoners,” followed by Baretzki telling Lali, without irony, not to stare because he’ll “frighten the children.”) As the lovers, Hauer-King and Próchniak are sweet and sad, with Próchniak making an especially strong impression. In terms of screen charisma, it’s easier to see what he saw her than what she saw in him.

At 84, playing an old Jewish man is not a stretch for Keitel, but he’s quite poignant — not the first word one associates with Keitel roles — not just as a man measuring his past, but as a lonely widower who has had an interested younger person come into his life. Trying to get Heather to stay awhile after the day’s interview, he sounds like the parent or grandparent you never visit enough: “The tennis is on in 15 minutes … I bought the chips you like.” And as the mild Heather, who worries increasingly that she’s in over her head — well, it’s always good to see Melanie Lynskey.

The series’ most nuanced performance, however — its most surprising, anyway — may belong to Nay. Moral compromises notwithstanding, Gita and Lali are clear-cut characters with straightforward motivations — stay alive, see each other as much as possible, help other prisoners when they can, get home, find each other. They’re heroes limited by circumstance — “In this hell that we’re in we’re only given two choices, the bad choice, or the worse one,” a fellow prisoner tells Lali — but Baretzki, whom we have no reason to like and many to hate, is a tragic figure, lonely, angry, awkward when not barking orders, looking for something like love, unpredictably violent, and doomed. That’s a lot for an actor to balance, and Nay does it marvelously well.

Though the well-informed might say different, the re-creation of Auschwitz feels trustworthy; and one can watch these evocations of death camp life with the same curiosity as if this were a documentary. The chimneys belching black smoke deliver a shock. Still, we’re looking at the past through a scrim of art, and no matter how dedicated “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” may be to getting things right, it’s a translation of a work of fiction based on a memory of an experience; a filtered reality, and only a slice of it. (And questions have been raised about the veracity of Morris’ novel.) The actors may have worked to inhabit their roles, or lost weight to play the part, but none are actually suffering, and we sense it. Through their privations they remain pretty people, as a screen romance would require; the producers want you to love these lovers and stick around six hours to the end. (And there’s a good new Barbra Streisand song .)

Coincidentally, or perhaps not, the series premieres days before the congressionally established, weeklong Holocaust Days of Remembrance begin Sunday, marking the anniversary of the Warsaw Uprising. Not a year goes by that at least one Holocaust drama, and usually more, comes to the small or big screen; “We Were the Lucky Ones” concludes its run on Hulu the day that “The Tattooist of Auschwitz” appears. Producers make pictures for all kinds of noble and less noble reasons, with greater and lesser success, but it’s good that these stories keep coming, given the ordinary dustbinning of history, the appallingly common denial of history, and a renascent antisemitism that was surging even before current events gave cover to antisemites.

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