News
Visitor Numbers Set New Record
Over 700 thousand people visited the site of the Nazi German Auschwitz Concentration Camp in the first 7 months of 2007—over 200 thousand more than in the corresponding period last year. This means that, if visitors keep arriving at the present level, the annual; total will exceed 1.2 million. Admission to the Museum is free.
According to Wprost news magazine, which surveyed tour operators that bring foreigners to Poland, the Auschwitz site tops the list of places that tourists want to see. Other leading Polish attractions include the Palace of Culture and Art (Warsaw), Cracow, the Sanctuary of Our Lady of Licheń, Malbork Castle, and Kazimierz Dolny.
Attendance at the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum has been rising steadily from year to year. The number of foreign-language Museum guides has kept pace. Specially trained in both the language and the subject matter, there are now 220 of them.
The ten countries that supply the largest numbers of visitors are, in order, Poland, the UK, the USA, France, Germany, South Korea, Israel, the Czech Republic, Sweden, Norway, and Spain.
Plans are on track to implement a personal audio system before the end of the year, in order to ensure that visitors receive adequate information about the history of the camp and the Museum exhibitions. Each group will receive sets of headphones, so that they can hear their guide’s explanations even when several different groups are in a given part of the exhibition. Similar systems are in use, and providing satisfactory results, in places including the Vatican and Yad Vashem in Israel.
There are also hopes that the planned S1 Expressway will ease the flow of traffic to Oświęcim and the Museum. The Expressway will pass close by the site of the Birkenau camp.
