| DAY TRIP FROM KRAKOW FRIDAY MAY 2ND 2008 Auschwitz
After years of watching films and reading books Bairdstravel took a day trip to the site of shocking concentration camp at Auschwitz. I imagined it would be sad but nothing prepares you for such a tragic location. Site of the Nazi notorious Auschwitz death camp is an hour’s drive from Krakow. Between June 1941 and January 1945 about one million men, women and children perished in the three Auschwitz concentration camps–i.e. Auschwitz proper, Birkenau and Monowitz–and their more than forty sub-camps. At its peak the whole complex was a deadly prison to some 150,000 inmates that were being either murdered outright or starved and worked to death.
Visiting the Auschwitz
Every year some 500,000 visitors come to Oswiecim, an industrial town of 45,000, to see the Auschwitz. Half of them are Poles, and the rest mostly from the USA, Germany, the UK, France, Italy, and Israel. Over 25 million people have already visited the place.
Admission to the Auschwitz is free. It takes minimum an hour to see the Auschwitz proper, and another to visit the nearby Birkenau site. They are open to visitors (except January 1, December 25, and Easter Sunday) from 8 a.m. to 7 p.m. June through August, till 6 p.m. in September, till 5 p.m. in October, till 4 p.m. in November through December 15, till 3 p.m. from December 16 through February, till 4 p.m. in March, till 5 p.m. in April, till 6 p.m. in May. Archives, library, collections, management, etc. work on weekdays from 8 a.m. to 2 p.m.
Independent visitors may and groups should employ an authorized guide. Over 150 of them provide tours in Croatian, Czech, English, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Russian, Serbian, and Spanish.
Oswiecim is easily accessible owing to the region’s extensive railroad and bus networks and the ample road system. When in Krakow, motorists may reach Oswiecim fastest via the paid four-lane highway to Katowice (exit to Chrzanów after some 20 minutes). As to public transport, bus seems more convenient. And numerous Krakow travel agencies offer one-day excursions to the Auschwitz. Please take time to visit http://www.auschwitz.dk/  The exact number of victims at Auschwitz is impossible to fix with certainty. Since the Nazis destroyed a number of records, immediate efforts to count the dead depended on the testimony of witnesses and the defendants on trial at Nuremberg. While under interrogation Rudolf Hoess, commandant of Auschwitz concentration camp from 1940 to 1943, said that Adolf Eichmann told him that two and a half million Jews had been killed in gas chambers and about half a million died "naturally". Later he wrote "I regard two and a half million far too high. Even Auschwitz had limits to its destructive possibilities".  Communist Polish and Soviet authorities maintained a figure "between 2.5 and 4 million". The figure "4,000,000" was used on the original Auschwitz memorial plaques. The plaques did not specify the ethnicities of victims. In 1983, French scholar George Wellers was one of the first to use German data on deportations to estimate the number killed at Auschwitz, arriving at 1.613 million dead, including 1.44 million Jews and 146,000 Catholic Poles.   A larger study started later by Franciszek Piper used timetables of train arrivals combined with deportation records to calculate 960,000 Jewish deaths and 140,000-150,000 ethnic Polish victims, along with 23,000 Roma and Sinti (Gypsies). This number has met with "significant, though not complete" agreement among scholars. According to Harmon and Drobnicki, estimates range from 800,000 to five million people. More recent and better researched estimates are on the lower end.  Birkenau  Buses leave Auschwitz I for Birkenau at a half past the hour, every hour. It costs two zloty and takes no more than five minutes. The experience of the camp is very different from Auschwitz I. For one thing it is much larger, covering over four hundred acres. It also retains the air of the place as it was when abandoned to a greater degree than the former camp. Some sixty seven buildings have survived virtually intact, and the interiors, with their stark wooden furnishings, take you right back to the war era. The other buildings remain as they were - some burnt to the ground and others massed up in heaps of rubble.
 MORE PHOTOGRAPHS OF AUCHWITZ  Auschwitz was a network of concentration camps built and operated in occupied Poland by Nazi Germany during the Second World War. It was the largest of the German's camps, consisting of Auschwitz I (the Stammlager or main camp); Auschwitz II-Birkenau (the Vernichtungslager or extermination camp); Auschwitz III-Monowitz, also known as Buna, a labor camp; and 45 satellite camps.  Auschwitz is the German name for Oświęcim, the town the camps were located in and around; it was renamed by the Germans after they invaded Poland in September 1939. Birkenau, the German translation of Brzezinka (birch tree), refers to a small Polish village nearby that was mostly destroyed by the Germans to make way for the camp. 
The camp commandant, Rudolf Höss, testified at the Nuremberg Trials that up to three million people had died at Auschwitz. The Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has revised this figure to 1.1 million, about 90 percent of them Jews from almost every country in Europe. Most of the victims were killed in gas chambers in Auschwitz II. Other deaths were caused by starvation, forced labor, lack of disease control, individual executions, and purported "medical experiments".  In 1947, in remembrance of the victims, Poland founded a museum at the site of the first two camps. By 1994, some 22 million visitors—700,000 annually—had passed through the iron gate crowned with the infamous motto, Arbeit macht frei ("work makes you free"). The liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops on January 27, 1945, is commemorated around the world on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.   ALL PHOTO`S TAKEN AND OWNED BY BAIRDSTRAVEL 
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