I was visiting Kraków Poland for a few weeks as I have heard many good things about Poland, from the good food to fast wifi, how cheap it is to live here, the nice friendly good looking people and the cleanliness of the city. While there a good friend of mine told me that I needed to go the Auschwitz tour, he basically told me not to leave Poland until I did the tour… So I decided to go to Auschwitz tour and now I know why he told me I needed to go.

Getting your tickets for the Auschwitz Guided Tour 

I searched high and low for the best price that includes everything…. The easiest way to buy your tickets is online, otherwise you’ll end up getting ripped off and paying “tourist tax” if you buy from a booth or at the hotel/hostel…
These guys “Get Your Guide” had the best and cheapest deal around one price includes your tour guide, transport too and from Auschwitz from Kraków and in between each of the camps, the price also included the head set to wear while you walk around the camps so you can hear the guide properly.

**Travellers Tip**
Bring some food, maybe a sandwich or fruit and a bottle of water, it’s a long day and you don’t want to do it hungry/thirsty.

So won’t go into too much detail about it here on this blog as I believe it’s something we all should see at some point in life. You can read this blog and I also created a little video on Instagram if you wanted to watch that as well, just click here add me on insta and you’ll see the video in the highlights, warning though it is a pretty sad….

A little bit about my experience of the Tour with a few photos and a short video.
It was a sad and quite emotional experience, the things that I saw was very heavy, as I walked in to the concentration camp, the first thing that I noticed was this sign (image below), it struck me in a way that this wan’t any theme park, this was real life and if these poor people that attempted to cross this area were shot dead immediately, no questions asked.

As I walked through the gates and into the exact area where each of these people were living, I could feel an eerie feeling come over me.

It was sad to see and hear the terrible things that occurred in these camps.
During the walk through, the tour the guide explained how the families that were already there, were forced to write letters to their families and tell them how good this camp was and they all should pack and come here immediately…
They were forced to encourage their own family to come to their death basically. That was heavy to hear, because as we know, if a family member or friend tells us about something, we are more inclined to do it because they’ve done it and they liked it, so we take their word for it and go. So imagine how easily it was for the German Natzis to get other family members to these camps from word of mouth, I hate to say it, they were clever and very cunning.

To get people into the gas chambers, the germans tricked them again by saying before you enter your new homes, you will need to take a bath/shower in the “bathing room”. So they made them take all of their clothes off and walked them in to this large room which actually looked like a bathing room, they took 750 in there at a time in the first came, they then locked the doors and threw down  3 to 4 cans of Cykolone B (a deadly gas) into the room and these cans would kill 750 within 20mins… Then they would burn 250 per 24 hours in the first camp.

They then built a much bigger second concentration camp… They had 2 gas chambers and the Natzis would put in 2500 people in each gas chamber per day so that’s 5000 people killed per 24 hours. Their furnaces’ were much bigger and hotter temperatures too and they were able to burn 2800 bodies per 24 hours in the second camp.

They had piles and piles of human hair which they shaved off the peoples heads before they were burned. Also you can see huge piles of shoes of the people that were killed both Adults and children’s shoes really sad…

That’s all I’ll say about this tour as there is lots to write and I don’t want to spoil it for you if you decide to visit.

One thing my tour guide said at the end was “you’ve been here and seen and heard enough of the terrible events that occured here in Auschwitz between 1940 -1945, now please do yourself a favor and don’t come back here again”.

I found that heavy too, and at the end of the day he’s right.

I hope you enjoyed this read, it wasn’t a happy one I know.

Until next time,

Jamie