Auschwitz tour from Warsaw - your complete travel guide

Discover the history of Auschwitz-Birkenau

What awaits you at the end of the journey from Warsaw is one of the most significant historical sites on earth. The Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum occupies the grounds where the Nazi regime operated its largest network of concentration and extermination camps during World War II. Since 1979, it has held UNESCO World Heritage status – a recognition of its irreplaceable role in preserving the memory of the Holocaust.

The camp’s origins trace back to mid-1940, when German occupation forces converted a former Polish military barracks on the edge of Oświęcim into a detention facility for political prisoners. That facility became Auschwitz I. On 14 June 1940, the first organised transport arrived: 728 Polish men — political detainees, Catholic clergy, and Jews – brought by rail from Tarnów. Each was stripped of identity, assigned a number, and forced into a regime of starvation labour that would define daily existence in the camp.

Within a year, the complex had outgrown its original boundaries. Beginning in 1941, prisoners were forced to build a vast second camp in the neighbouring village of Brzezinka, roughly 3 kilometres away. This became Auschwitz II-Birkenau – a sprawling site of wooden barracks that offered almost no protection against the harsh Polish winters. Prisoners perished in enormous numbers from exposure, hunger, disease, and exhaustion. It was here that the Nazi regime centralised its machinery of mass killing.

The systematic use of poison gas began in September 1941, when an estimated 850 Soviet prisoners of war and gravely ill Polish inmates were killed using Zyklon B in the underground cells of Block 11. Over the following years, purpose-built gas chambers and crematoria were erected at Birkenau, and the killing was carried out on an industrial scale. Entire transports of men, women, and children were led from the railway ramp directly to their deaths, many without ever being entered into the camp’s records.

As Soviet forces advanced westward in late 1944 and early 1945, the SS scrambled to erase what had taken place. Crematoria were dynamited, documents incinerated, and tens of thousands of surviving prisoners were forced onto death marches. Liberation came on 27 January 1945, when soldiers of the Soviet 322nd Rifle Division entered the camp and found roughly 7,000 emaciated survivors.

In the aftermath, former prisoners – among them Tadeusz Wąsowicz – worked with the Polish government to transform the site into a memorial and museum. Formally established in 1946, it today safeguards an enormous collection: personal belongings confiscated from victims, artworks made in secret by prisoners, extensive photographic archives, and administrative documents that the Nazis failed to destroy.

Scholars continue to refine the estimates, but the consensus holds that more than 1.1 million human beings were murdered within this complex – approximately 90 percent of them Jewish, alongside tens of thousands of Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners, and others targeted by the regime. The memorial stands so that every name, every story, and every lesson drawn from this place remains part of our collective conscience.

The road from Warsaw is long, but those who make the journey — whether to learn, to remember, or to stand where a family member once stood – consistently describe it as one of the most important experiences of their lives.