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Krakow to Auschwitz Birkenau Tours

7:30 AM - 7:00 PM

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Auschwitz-Birkenau Guided Tour with Fast Track Tickets

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Fast-track entrance to Auschwitz-Birkenau

Local host who will meet you close to Auschwitz I

Guided tour by an official Auschwitz-Birkenau guide

7-8 hour guided tour of Auschwitz-Birkenau

Expert guide available in 7 languages

Skip-the-line access

Lunch (optional)

AC vehicle transfers from Krakow with meeting point pickup

Entrance fees

Entry to Auschwitz-Birkenau

Expert licensed English, Polish, French, Spanish, Italian, Dutch or German-speaking guide

Hotel pick-up and drop-off

Transfers by an AC minivan or minibus

Audio equipment rental

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About Auschwitz concentration camp

The Auschwitz Concentration Camp witnessed the suffering of millions of Jews during World War II. Its solemn grounds now serve as a memorial and museum, preserving the memory of those who perished within its confines.

Why visit Auschwitz concentration camp?

Explore the site of the holocaust.

Auschwitz-Birkenau symbolizes the systematic genocide orchestrated by the Nazi regime against Jewish people, as well as other targeted groups.

Catch a glimpse into the life of the camp prisoners

See the preserved barracks, gas chambers, and crematoria, offering a visceral glimpse into the harsh realities of life and death within the camps.

Go on an educational experience

Gain insights into the atrocities of the past, fostering understanding and empathy while reflecting on the importance of human rights and tolerance.

Honor the victims

By visiting the concentration camp, you contribute to honoring the memory of the millions who perished, ensuring that their stories are never forgotten.

• Between 1940 and 1945, Auschwitz received over 1.3 million deportees. Tragically, approximately 1.1 million, primarily Jews, met their untimely demise within its confines.
• The entrance of Auschwitz I bears the German phrase "Arbeit macht frei," translated as "Work sets you free." Crafted by prisoners, the sign holds a symbolic defiance, as they subtly inverted the letter 'B'.
• Attempting to break free from the horrors, over 800 prisoners dared to escape from Auschwitz. However, only 144 succeeded, while 327 were recaptured, and the fate of others remains unknown.
• Dr. Josef Mengele, infamously known as the "Angel of Death" at the Auschwitz Concentration Camp, used to conduct medical experiments on prisoners, especially on twins and dwarfs.

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Krakow to Auschwitz Birkenau Tours Guide

All your auschwitz birkenau tour options, self-guided tour, guided tours, fast track entry, combo tours, recommended experiences, which auschwitz birkenau tour should you pick, if you are on a budget, if you want to learn more about the concentration camps, if you are short on time , if you want to explore more in krakow , auschwitz birkenau tour offers, discounted tickets, plan your auschwitz-birkenau tour, opening hours, getting there, guidelines/facilities.

• Guests are requested to adhere to a respectful decorum at all times in recognition of the loss of human life at Auschwitz. 
• Dress appropriately without any controversial symbols/flags/emblems on clothing attire.
• Outside food and drinks and smoking is not permitted within the premises.
• Mobile phones must be kept on silent or vibrate-only mode.

What To See On An Auschwitz-Birkenau Tour in Krakow

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• Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum

Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum tours

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Auschwitz and Birkenau self-guided tour with transfer from Krakow

Self-guided tour to UNESCO museums Auschwitz and Birkenau including guidebook in 19 languages and transport to the museums from Krakow city center.

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Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial guided tour from Krakow

Book a guided tour to Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum and Memorial from Krakow. Follow a licensed guide and visit the concentration camp.

Auschwitz-Birkenau skip-the-line entrance ticket and official guided tour

See the horrors of Auschwitz-Birkenau and attend the fully guided tour at Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II Birkenau.

Auschwitz-Birkenau tour from Krakow with hotel pickup

Learn about the enormity of the human tragedy and the lives of prisoners in the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp. Take part in a guided tour and organized transport from Krakow.

Auschwitz - Birkenau guided Memorial tour from Krakow

Book your tour from Krakow and visit Auschwitz Birkenau, a former concentration camp with a professional English-speaking guide.

Auschwitz-Birkenau Skip-the-Line Entry Tickets

Visit Auschwitz Birkenau, a former concentration, camp with an official museum guide-educator. Book your tour from Krakow.

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Auschwitz-Birkenau Museum guided tour

Visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex, the largest of the Nazi concentration camps, and learn more about the everyday life of prisoners from a licensed guide.

Auschwitz-Birkenau guided tour with transport

Book the guided tour to Auschwitz-Birkenau with a transport service from Krakow. See the Holocaust memorial and learn about the story of WWII.

Auschwitz-Birkenau fast-track entry pass and guided tour

Visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial. Save time at the entrance thanks to the fast-track entry and visit the venue with a professional guide.

Auschwitz-Birkenau and Wieliczka Salt Mine in one day tour

Visit Auschwitz-Birkenau and the Wieliczka Salt Mine in one day! Make most of your time with this fully organized day trip from Krakow.

Auschwitz Birkenau and Wieliczka Salt Mine in one day from Krakow

Visit Auschwitz Birkenau, a former concentration camp with a professional English speaking guide and Wieliczka Salt Mine registered on the UNESCO list.

Auschwitz Shuttle

Use a convenient shuttle bus and visit Auschwitz - Birkenau Concentration Camp by yourself. It is the fastest and the most comfortable way to get there from Krakow,

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Krakow Auschwitz-Birkenau self-guided tour

Visit the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum and follow a self-guided audio tour through the camp.

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Explore Krakow in a unique and affordable way. A self-guided city trail will guide you to the best spots in the city while playing fun riddles and assignments on your smartphone.

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Explore the Royal Wawel Castle, one of the most spectacular castles in Europe, with an expert English-speaking guide and learn about the history of Polish Kings.

Wieliczka Salt Mine guided tour with hotel transfers

Explore caves and chambers carved out of the rock at Wieliczka Salt Mine and visit one of the original World Heritage Sites listed by UNESCO. Book your tour online and enjoy private transportation from Krakow.

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The inside story

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex has left its inglorious mark on human history. A symbol of the Holocaust, during its five years of operation over a million Jews, along with Poles, Romani and other groups, were systematically killed by German Occupiers in WWII. Confronting and emotionally charged, a visit to the complex is an essential part of the human experience.

Composed of two sections, Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II-Birkenau, together they convey the magnitude of the compound. Auschwitz I was the main site opened in 1940 with the now infamous sign on its gate Arbeit macht frei (‘Work sets you free’). It held the first camps, the offices of the SS and was where criminal medical experiments and the first gassings using Zyklon B took place. Auschwitz II-Birkenau came later and for all intents and purposes became an extermination camp. The remains of its gas chambers and crematorium, along with primitive barracks, can still be seen.

Since 1947 this site has become a memorial and museum dedicated to the many victims of Auschwitz. Both camps require at least 90 minutes each to gain a comprehensive understanding of the events that took place here. With over two million visitors per year, it’s well advised to book in advance.

How to get there

Online guided tours for individual visitors

Individual visitors can visit the Auschwitz Memorial with a guide online thanks to the "Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes" platform.

Groups are organized in three language versions, and the visits starts at a predetermined time.

Entry cards are available at visit.auschwitz.org  at "online individual visit" section. 

The online tour lasts about two hours and is divided into two parts – in Auschwitz I and Birkenau. The guide's narration is conducted live. Additionally, the educator will also use multimedia materials, archival photographs, artistic works, documents, and testimonies of Survivors. Thanks to the application, interaction with the guide and asking questions is also possible.

Online tours hours (time in Poland):

• English: 12:30 daily • German: 12:15 pm Saturday/Sunday • Polish: 12:00 pm Saturday/Sunday

• Polish: 13:00 Saturday/Sunday • German: 13:15 Saturday/Sunday • English: 13:30 daily

• English: 14:30 daily • German: 14:15 Saturday/Sunday • Polish: 14:00 Saturday/Sunday

APRIL - SEPTEMBER

• English: 8:30; 14:30; 17:00 daily • German: 14:15 Saturday/Sunday • Polish: 14:00 Saturday/Sunday

• English: 13:30 daily • German: 13:15 Saturday/Sunday • Polish: 13:00 Saturday/Sunday

NOVEMBER - DECEMBER

• English: 12:30 daily • German: 12:15 Saturday/Sunday • Polish: 12:00 Saturday/Sunday

More information about the "Auschwitz in Front of Your Eyes" platform .

• via @auschwitzmuseum" aria-label="Udostępnij na Twitter">

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]).

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Why Were The Stairs Warped?

Staircase in a prison block (Simon Norfolk – Auschwitz)

The tour guide at Auschwitz I took our group into block 4, and I was hyper aware of everything since it was the first block I’d ever been in. Maybe I was extremely dramatic, which was definitely self-inflicted, but I was afraid to breathe the air in there. Afraid that the air would tell me something sinister that I didn’t know about Auschwitz yet. First of all, air doesn’t necessarily have a voice, at least as far as I am concerned. But that doesn’t mean that air can’t. Stay with me, Reader, I am a unique writer without any formal training. I can’t remember what we saw or what the tour guide talked about throughout the block because on my left, at the end of a hallway, were a set of marble stairs. I was struck by the oddness of each step that led to the 2nd level; each step of marble was warped. Warped in the way that very thin metal bends, but each step was made of hard marble, and two directions of wear were present. Throughout the stairs’ lifetime, they’d been traveled up and down a lot. As worn down as they are, it’s possible that visitors have carved the marble overtime. It’s possible that the stairs had been subjected to the wear of even the Polish soldiers who had utilized the building before Nazi prisoner’s ever had.

To me, the stairs symbolize many things, but I want to draw attention to them as a symbol of the history of World War II. Pay no attention to the up-and-down directions that stairs mean. Focus on the plains and valleys of a single step. The plain of marble symbolizes the general history of the era, so the textbook lessons that I read throughout my K-12 education. These lessons are introductory, and they state factual history without any primary sources. On the step, there are two sides that are incredibly worn down. They slope upwards towards the middle of the step where the marble is level. Let’s say that the right slope symbolizes the written and oral experiences of the survivors and victims who were persecuted by the Nazis. Their stories alter the factual history in grade school textbooks by breaking down the general facts, exposing the layers of how scary and sad being on the receiving end of Nazi atrocities was. Once the graphic details are revealed, you can never forget them. For me, the most shocking details are of the starvation of prisoners (Elie Weisel, Night, 100-102), the humiliation of Jews forced to scrub streets with their bare hands (Dokumentationsarchiv des Oesterreichischen, USHMM), and the picture of a Ukrainian Jew kneeling at the edge of a mass grave where he’d fall forward into the grave after he was shot (USHMM). Knowing these details have worn on me overtime because they have been useful in my own attempt at understanding of the magnanimity of the Holocaust specifically. They are the steps that I take to asking deeper, more complex questions about history. Without them, no one would truly know what happened during that time.

In the left valley on the marble steps, I can insert anything, such as the experiences of Nazi soldiers. This can be frustrating if you don’t understand why reading and listening to their experiences, especially parallel to their victims’, is important to fully understanding the context in which they operated.

Hopefully you see now why the warped stairs in block 4 gained my attention. Bringing the up-and-down aspect of them back into this discussion, going up the steps can be hard, but so can going down them. Learning the history of World War II can be hard and intense, and sometimes easy, but every step is important because it holds stories and experiences that no one would know if they were not investigated. Look around. The most obvious, seemingly uninteresting objects may have the most stories to tell.

By Isabella Scully-Tenpenny

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• What Is Cinema?

The Man Who Ran Auschwitz, and the Woman Who Survived It

By Julie Miller

Auschwitz is made even more horrifying by the simple fact that someone had to dream up its atrocities in the first place. One of those people was Rudolf Höss, an SS officer who was tasked with devising a method to efficiently kill Jews. As commandant of the notorious concentration camp, Höss oversaw the use of Zyklon-B pesticide, sometimes donning a gas mask himself to supervise the mass murder of what he estimated to be 2.5 million victims. After World War II, Höss was sentenced to death at the Nuremberg Trials, and hanged in 1947.

But Höss’s son Hans-Jurgen Höss, now 87, never knew the commandant as a monster. Even though his family lived a few hundred yards from the concentration camp, separated from it by just a garden and a high concrete wall, Hans grew up oblivious to his father’s awful truth. Hans and his young siblings were told that the camp, inside occupied Poland, was a prison and their father ran it. The family was privileged: They had a pool and staff—and some of Hans’s happiest memories were from that early-1940s period in Auschwitz. (The Höss family’s dissonantly idyllic home life was recently dramatized in the Oscar-winning narrative film The Zone of Interest. )

When filmmaker Daniela Volker first contacted Hans several years ago, he was in such denial about his father’s role in history that he hadn’t even read the memoir Höss had written in prison. “It was too painful and just too much to deal with,” Volker says. “I understood pretty much the first time I met him that Hans-Jurgen Höss had spent 80-something years avoiding dealing with who he was. He had an extremely idealized vision of his father, because at home, the father he knew was a loving, kind, wonderful father—actually, for the 1940s, very involved with his children, whenever work permitted it. Auschwitz seemed to be the place where he’d been happiest as a child, unaware of what was happening beyond the garden wall.”

Hans’s idea of his father was at complete odds with the man who wrote matter-of-factly in his memoir about enabling mass murders. “It was almost like a true-crime story in which the criminal wrote his deathbed confession,” says Volker, who was “absolutely floored” to discover the autobiography existed.

Volker says that it took her about a year to convince Hans, through his pastor son Kai, to face his father’s legacy—and to do so on camera in The Commandant’s Shadow, a documentary in theaters May 30. Asked why she thinks Hans finally felt ready to confront the past, Volker suggests it was part age, part logistics. “I came along and sort of facilitated it,” she explains. While filming, Hans returned to his childhood home and visited the concentration camp his father oversaw for the first time. “We organized the trip, so it didn’t require any more effort beyond turning up,” Volker says. “I don’t think psychologically he would’ve been able to actually organize it.”

In The Commandant’s Shadow , Hans’s confrontation with his father’s past climaxes when he meets Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, a 98-year-old survivor of the Auschwitz hell that Höss commanded. “I persuaded [Hans] that it’s important, not just for him but for the historical record, to document the encounter of two eyewitnesses who saw Auschwitz from two really, very different sides,” says Volker. “He had to overcome himself in order to be able to do it. But he understood why it was important.”

Lasker-Wallfisch’s life was spared only because she played cello. Her lawyer father and violinist mother were killed upon arrival at Izbica, a transit ghetto in Poland. But the Auschwitz guards apparently took their entertainment seriously, and needed a cellist for the orchestra they had assembled from the prisoner population. Lasker-Wallfisch and the other “lucky” musicians played marches morning and night amid the camp’s horrors.

“Their circumstances couldn’t have been more different,” says Volker of her film subjects. “He lived in utter luxury. She was in a barrack. She was lucky she was a musician because they had better food—not that that was much to talk about, but at least they had better rations.”

Lasker-Wallfisch, who has spoken publicly about her experiences during the Holocaust, didn’t flinch at the idea of welcoming Hans into her London sitting room. In the scene, Hans is understandably nervous when he greets the Auschwitz survivor. It is Lasker-Wallfisch, a no-nonsense type with a cigarette in hand, who puts Hans at ease.

“It was brave of you to do this,” she tells him, piercing the tension in the room. When Hans tells her, referring to his father’s actions, “We live with the guilt,” Lasker-Wallfisch replies, “You weren’t asked whose son you want to be.” She later concludes, “You can’t forgive what happened but the important thing is that we talk to each other and understand each other.”

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By Tara Ariano

By Anthony Breznican

Volker didn’t know what would happen when the two came face-to-face. “It was interesting—they were both, of course, German, so they spoke German to each other. You realize that these people were quite similar. They came from close families. [Lasker-Wallfisch’s] father was a World War I veteran, so was [Hans’s]. And they were separated by ideology. It makes you think about the power of ideology. In another life, maybe Höss would’ve been a car salesman and would’ve sold the most cars of anyone in Germany. But he just happened to subscribe to this deadly, crazy ideology.”

Hans and Lasker-Wallfisch were joined in the meeting, and in the documentary, by their adult children—Hans’s son Kai and Lasker-Wallfisch’s daughter Maya, a psychoanalyst, both of whom have been indelibly shaped by their parents’ histories. In The Commandant’s Shadow, they describe haunted childhoods in which their parents refused to discuss their pasts, and the way that second-generation secrecy and trauma impacted them.

“Whether a descendant of a victim or a perpetrator, in a way what happens is quite similar—it’s the silence which is corrosive and toxic, and the sensation of knowing that something very wrong is there, lingering,” says Volker. The filmmaker wanted to capture “the shock waves that events in the past sent down the generations. The past is not just the past—it’s important because it ripples down. It has an effect on the present, and we can learn from it.”

The generational effect of trauma is something that Lasker-Wallfisch’s daughter Maya has spent her life untangling. After surviving a lonely childhood and drug addiction, Maya became a psychoanalyst. She wrote a memoir about her family, Letter to Breslau, that was published in German. Mother and daughter had a relationship that was, at times, difficult; given what Lasker-Wallfisch had experienced at Auschwitz, she could not wrap her mind around Maya’s suffering. At one point, Lasker-Wallfisch told Maya that she was not the right mother for Maya—a line that devastated Maya, and that Lasker-Wallfisch repeats in the documentary. “I was emotional,” Maya explains. “I had human needs, as every human does.”

Now, Maya says in an interview, she and Lasker-Wallfisch have reached a point of understanding in their relationship: “She gets it now completely. She gets how her absence was devastating for me.”

The making of the documentary brought mother and daughter slightly closer too. Lasker-Wallfisch appreciated that her daughter went to Auschwitz to accompany the commandant’s son on his first trip to the concentration camp, giving him a tour of the hellscape his father supervised.

“His terror was greater than mine, and his suffering was greater than mine in terms of what he had to grapple with,” recalls Maya, who found herself, as a psychoanalyst, wearing many hats throughout that emotionally grueling day with Hans. “I was being my mother’s daughter, Maya the therapist. All the time I’m conscious of the whole dynamic that is unfolding, so it was hard. But it should be hard.”

When Maya visited her mother afterward, Lasker-Wallfisch greeted her in an uncharacteristically warm manner. “Her words to me were, ‘Welcome home, hero. Tell me everything,’” Maya recalls, savoring the memory. “The film relieved me of one thing: I got to make my mother proud.”

The sit-down between Hans, the Auschwitz commandant’s son, and her mother, the Auschwitz survivor, happened about a day after this triumphant homecoming. Inside Lasker-Wallfisch’s home, both she and Hans marveled at the fact that they were coming together amicably given their pasts.

“A historic moment,” Lasker-Wallfisch said.

“Who would have thought it?” Hans replied.

The survivor is not one to waste breath on adjectives, but afterward she called the meeting with Hans “beautiful.”

“That’s not a word that she commonly uses for anything, including her own daughter,” Maya points out. “But for the word to come out of her mouth in that context.… She was just so remarkable in her generosity.”

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Headout Buys AI Startup Dabble to Boost Travel Experiences Search

Jesse Chase-Lubitz , Skift

May 31st, 2024 at 9:00 AM EDT

In a strategic acquisition, Headout looks to enhance its AI capabilities by integrating Dabble.

Jesse Chase-Lubitz

Headout , which runs an app to help travelers book experiences, said Friday it had acquired Dabble , a startup that helps companies use artificial intelligence (AI) more effectively.

Headout had already been using AI for content creation, fraud prevention, and price-setting. Its platform covers 125 cities worldwide and serves more than 27 million people. The company said it turned profitable in 2021 and that it raised more than $40 million in venture capital in 2022.

Dabble launched in 2021 and works with e-commerce sites like Amazon, Wayfair, Pottery Barn, and Etsy. It helps companies accelerate content creation, create better work pipelines, and build more accurate models for products. The company went through the Y Combinator startup program. 

Headout’s co-founder and CEO, Varun Khona, said he couldn’t publicize how his company will use Dabble’s expertise just yet.

“We will have something meaningful to share later in the year as a big launch,” he said.

For now, Khona shared three big themes: personalization, immersive media, and creating new experiences “with AI at the center of it all.”

AI’s streamlining potential

Industry experts see potential for AI to help small travel-experience businesses bolster their operations.

“Experiences is the most diverse, most fragmented travel sector,” said Douglas Quinby, co-founder and CEO of Arival , adding that the vast majority of operators are small or micro businesses that have varying levels of technology adoption.

The industry has particularly high expectations of AI to help with discovery and recommendations, according to Quinby. “Travelers can be overwhelmed with choice. Viator alone offers more than 4,000 tours in Rome,” he said. “The hope is that smart AI tools could offer a better recommendation engine.”

Craig Everett, CEO of Holibob , which provides booking technology to online sellers of travel and tourism boards, said that AI can help customers navigate this fragmented and overwhelming landscape of options.

He added that Headout is focusing on providing customers with quality over quantity. “Rather than overwhelm customers with choice, they’ve smartly pre-curated what travelers see,” Everett said. “The next step, and something we’re working hard on, is building the relevancy on top of that product quality to even further help travelers narrow in on the perfect things for their trip.”

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• Cast & crew
• User reviews

The Commandant's Shadow

Follows Hans Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the Camp Commandant of Auschwitz when he confronts his father's involvement in the murder of over a million Jews during the Holocaust. Follows Hans Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the Camp Commandant of Auschwitz when he confronts his father's involvement in the murder of over a million Jews during the Holocaust. Follows Hans Jürgen Höss, the son of Rudolf Höss, the Camp Commandant of Auschwitz when he confronts his father's involvement in the murder of over a million Jews during the Holocaust.

• Daniela Volker
• Adolf Hitler
• Rudolf Hoess
• Hans-Jürgen Höss
• 1 User review
• 3 Critic reviews

• (archive footage)

• (as Hans Jurgen Höss)
• (as Kay-Uwe Höss)

• Höss' Autobiography read by
• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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User reviews 1

• May 29, 2024
• May 29, 2024 (United States)
• Warner Bros.
• See more company credits at IMDbPro

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• Runtime 1 hour 43 minutes

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