Visiting Auschwitz, Oswiecim, Poland

I lived in DC for two years and on my one and only attempt to visit the Holocaust Museum, I left crying before getting to the main exhibit. So I don’t know why I thought I could tour Auschwitz and Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration camps, and be fine.

There are two ways to visit the camps from Kraków: with a tour or on your own. Most tours are anywhere from $25-30 and take you to both sites, and of course, transport you the hour and a half or so it takes to get there. In order to save money and because I had no interest in being a sobbing mess in front of a bus full of people for 8 hours, we went on our own.

The train from Kraków is $2 each way. The downside to the train is that the closest station, Oswiecim, is 20 minutes walking from Auschwitz. It’s not a bad walk but considering how much you have to walk at the sites, it’s better to avoid it. Luckily, there is a bus, Lajkonik, that also runs to and from Auschwitz that picks you up directly there. The bus ends up being a little bit faster, and hour and 15 minutes instead of 1:45 or 2 hours and costs $3.50. Since entrance to the camps is free, you really can’t get any cheaper than that to spend a day crying and reflecting on the atrocities that people inflict on other human beings. ...... (follow the instructions below for accessing the rest of this article).