A truly horrific place

Photo through the fence into the camp at Auschwitz
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The Polish name may not be familiar but is the village where the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps is located. It's one of the most visited tourist sites in Poland and is well worth a visit even though it's not a fun place to go. I would agree with the museum in that it is not appropriate for children under 14 as some of the exhibitions are confronting. Adults were clearly struggling with some of the rooms and I had a cry in the middle of one exhibition.

Getting out here is easy on public transport so there is no need to sign up for one of the expensive tours. Buses leave regularly from the main bus station and go via a few villages. It takes about 1.5 hours to get out to the camp site. The stop for the museum is clearly marked and our driver announced it as well for us. To get back into the city there is a bus stop in the carpark which has fairly regular departures. There is a list on the wall in the museum that lists departure times and where you need to go to catch the bus.

The remains of the camp at Birkenau. Most of the buildings were wooden and were burnt down by the retreating Nazis
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The main museum is at Auschwitz and this is where you start. You can join a tour which does this, the movie and Birkenau over about 2.5 hours (26zl) but speaking to people who did the tour, it doesn't tell you much more than the signs that are around the camps and the guide book which you can get at the office. The tour also does not cover some of the exhibits within Auschwitz  and I felt the exhibitions from different nations were some of the best and most informative in the museum. If you do go on the tour it would be worth coming back to look at the collection again by yourself if you have time. You have to come back to Auschwitz to get transport anyway as there are no buses from Birkenau back to Krakow or the station.

I didn't do a tour so headed off into the camp at my own pace. The route is well signposted so you can do the buildings in the appropriate order. The camp is slightly surreal because the buildings are in very good condition. Lots of them were just left like that by the retreating Nazis and the rest have been restored. There are three rows of buildings inside the wire fences and then scattered buildings outside that are used by administration now. You enter the camp through the main "arbeit macht frei" gate that is so famous and then head through the main walkway to the back of the camp. There are then a series of exhibits in the barracks that show what life was like in the camp and the process of selection on arrival. The most devastating of all of these was the collection of possessions of people who died in the camps. The rooms are simple with just glass cases with the objects in them. It is the sheer volume of objects that gets to you more than the individual objects themselves. There are lots of prayer shawls, shoes, bowls, eyeglasses but the worst two rooms in this building are upstairs. One contains a large amount of human hair. There is about 1950kg of it and this is only part of the amount that they found when they liberated the camp. There was 7000kg in a warehouse waiting for transport to Germany where is was being used to make cloth. There is a small roll of the cloth also in the room.

The other room contains suitcases with the name and address of the owner on them. It's just a giant glass wall with stacks of suitcases behind it. In this same room is a small cabinet with babies clothes and rattles in it. This is where I cried. The beautiful little hand made matinee jackets were too much for me.

You almost need a time out after this building but there is little respite. If you do bring teenagers into the museum I'd consider leaving this building out.

Continuing along the row of buildings you come to the prison building where they used to punish people who had been involved in escape attempts or thought to be stealing food. It was also used for local polish people who had been accused of trying to help the prisoners. It was the site of the SS court as well as executions. This building is very cramped and there were a lot of people trying to get in. There is only enough room in a lot of the place for a single file in each direction. Because of all the large tour groups this meant that you had to keep moving the whole time, not really giving you long enough to look at everything.

The next row is where the tour groups move on and I stopped to look at the exhibits from other nations. In the middle row of buildings,starting with number 20 are a series of collections put together by other nations who had people sent to Auschwitz. Some are only small, while others fill most of a building. The best two that I went to were the French and the Polish. They both had full English translations of the information and were well laid out. The French particularly had an interesting room on the people who were sent to Auschwitz for helping Jewish children escape into Switzerland. These people managed to save 75% of the Jewish population of France from the gas chambers. Many have been posthumously awarded for their bravery in helping strangers. There is one particularly moving room devoted to the children from France that came to Auschwitz. The walls are covered with pictures of them before the war with the date of their death written underneath.

There is another interesting exhibit devoted to the Roma population who were sent from Eastern Europe to Auschwitz. It has lots of pre-war pictures and information about all the countries from which they came. These exhibits are in some ways more horrific than the concentration camp ones because you see the people when they were well and happy and you know what happened to them all. Most of the exhibits have listed the time and place of death for most of the people in the photos. Some don't have family left so couldn't be identified.

After this series of buildings, I headed along the road to the assembly area where roll calls and hangings took place and then to the crematorium. This was dynamited by the Nazis before they left but has been reconstructed using bits from other less damaged buildings in other camps. It's a pretty creepy place to go into and again I'd consider not taking teenagers into here. If you go in with a tour group it's pretty crowded and you have to keep behind them so try to get in between groups if you can.

That is the end of the Auschwitz tour and then you go out the front and catch the free shuttle to Birkenau (AKA Auschwitz II). The bus goes every hour on the half hour from about 11.30am. It's only about 5 minutes to Birkenau and you could probably walk it in about 30 minutes if you wanted to. It is well signposted. Birkenau is the mass extermination camp that was built as a supplement to the forced labour camp at Auschwitz. Most of the people sent here were gassed without even being registered at the gate. The train tracks end next to the two largest gas chambers and crematoria. The camp did keep some people as workers and is enormous. Auschwitz isn't very big and is right in the suburbs of Oswiecim while Birkenau is on the edge with lots of space around it. Most of the buildings were destroyed as they were made of wood but there are a few brick barracks left standing and all the rest are just the foundations and the chimneys. The crematoria were dynamited and have been left in the condition in which they were found. There are less signs around Birkenau but some have interesting photos taken by the SS officers of what the camp looked like when it was functioning. There are lots more memorials here as the ashes of the people killed were spread on the land behind the camp. You would think that the ashes of 1.5 million people would leave more of a mark.

There is a particularly moving memorial from the world that marks the end of the train tracks and has a message in the languages of all the people who died there. There was a large group of Polish school kids there and many were crying, even the boys. There are lots of flowers placed on the memorial there. If you would like to do this you need to buy the flowers in Auschwitz before coming out to Birkenau. You then walk place a section known as Canada (I'm not sure why) which is where they stored all the Jews possessions prior to transporting them to Germany. There were lots of warehouses which even when the camp was liberated were full of stuff. The Nazis set fire to them before they left but lots of the contents survived.

It's hard in Birkenau to match what you are seeing with what happened there. It's a peaceful place without traffic noise and with lots of grass and trees and then just all these remains of buildings spread around the area. You know what happened in them and you know that you are walking on the ashes of hundreds of thousands of people but it doesn't seem quite real. It took me just over an hour to walk around the entire complex as some areas are fenced off. The buses back to Auschwitz leave on the hour every hour from the carpark.

Once back at Auschwitz I headed back into Krakow on the bus. Make sure that you get near the head of the queue or you will end up standing up for a couple of hours. Because it was peak hour it took over 2 hours to get back into the city. The whole day cost me only 28zl which is a lot less than the tours which are advertised in the city. It is easy to do this by yourself and in some ways you get more out of the experience when you aren't being herded around by the guides.