01 Jun 2025
So we've been waiting years to visit Auschwitz and Birkenau as it's been on our bucket list for a very long time. Our tour guide, Lukas, was exceptional ! Very VERY informative and had fantastic stories etc, he made the tour feel very real and definitely opened our eyes to the history of the place and for what people went through so a huge HUGE thankyou to him and also to Matty for picking and dropping us off.
The tour is a lot of walking, as expected. What definitely lets the tour down is the time given to take in surroundings and appreciate what you're travelled a very long way to see. This mainly being the sites inside the buildings. There is so soooooooooooooo many other tours going on that you're basically forced through locations at speed and don't get time to properly see artifacts and possessions etc We looked forward to seeing and appreciating things like the hair, shoes, baggage etc but were forced passed the displays due to many tours behind us and our tour guide being ahead. This really let it down. The venue really should account for the volume of people and LET people see what they've paid good money to appreciate. It's not on racing people through just to gain as much income as possible....let people have more time to stop, see and absorb the displays and areas i.e standing or starvation cells etc
Aside from this the tour guide was simply AMAZING ! the headsets helped a lot to hear what was being told to us at all times, maybe a couple of times it broke up but most of the time we were able to hear.
Oh and we had very very veryyyyyyyyyyyyyyy little time i.e less than 5mins to go into and buy stuff from the gift shop(s) which again was hugely disappointing as we wanted to take gifts back and things for ourselves.