Poland Family Travel Guide

Formality first, warmth second. Pan and Pani, sir and madam, get used with strangers as a matter of course. Once you are a guest in someone’s home it flips entirely and you will be fed until you cannot move.

Catholicism is woven in. Churches are working churches, not exhibits. Cover shoulders, keep children quiet, and do not photograph people praying. Sunday morning is busy for a reason.

Be careful how you talk about the war. Never say Polish death camps. They were German camps built in occupied Poland, and the distinction matters enormously here. Poland lost around six million people, roughly a fifth of its population.

Shoes off in homes. Always, and there will be slippers waiting for you.

If you are invited to dinner, bring flowers. An odd number of stems, never chrysanthemums, which are for graves. Vodka is also acceptable and will be opened.

Zloty, not euro. Poland is in the EU and has kept its own currency. Use a bank ATM or a kantor, which is a proper exchange office, and always decline the machine’s own conversion rate.

Poland is close to cashless. Contactless works almost everywhere, including trams and market stalls. Carry a hundred zloty for toilets, small churches and rural stops.

Ten percent, and do not say thank you as you hand the money over. Dziekuje while paying is understood as keep the change, which is fine unless you wanted change.

Learn what a bar mleczny is. The milk bars are the single best budget tool in the country. Cheap, filling, no English menu, no atmosphere, excellent food.

Toilets cost two to three zloty. Coins or contactless at the turnstile. Shopping centers are the free option.

Apteka is the pharmacy. Excellent, cheap, and pharmacists handle minor problems directly. Private clinics are inexpensive and fast if you need a doctor.

Four days. Krakow only. Two days in the old town and Kazimierz, one at the Wieliczka salt mine, and one for Auschwitz if your family is doing it. That is a full, honest trip.

Seven days. Krakow for four, train to Warsaw for three. Two very different cities. Krakow survived the war largely intact, Warsaw did not, and seeing both in one week teaches more than either alone.

Ten days. Krakow, Warsaw, Gdansk. Add the Baltic coast in summer and Malbork Castle on the way. Three trains, three bases, no repacking every night.

Two weeks with a car. Add Zakopane and the Tatras, Wroclaw, and as many castles as your family will tolerate. This is the version where Poland stops being a city break.

Krakow. Ours, sort of. We slept under Wawel Castle and then drove through the city instead of walking it, which I still count as a mistake. Krakow came through the war largely undamaged, so the medieval old town is real rather than rebuilt. The main square is the largest in medieval Europe. Kazimierz, the old Jewish quarter, is where the food and the atmosphere are now. Schindler’s Factory is here and is a serious museum, not a film tie in.

Auschwitz-Birkenau. Ours, and the reason this page exists. Ninety minutes from Krakow, among small towns and fog filled farmland. Entry is free but you need a booked slot, and a guided tour is compulsory in the busy middle of the day. Two hours at Auschwitz I, then a shuttle three kilometers to Birkenau, which is twenty times larger. There is a full section on bringing children below and I would ask you to read it before you book.

Warsaw. Over eighty percent flattened and then rebuilt from paintings, which is the whole story of the city in one sentence. The Warsaw Uprising Museum is immersive and intense and better for teenagers than for young children. The Copernicus Science Centre is the opposite and is one of the best children’s museums in Europe.

Gdansk. A Hanseatic port with a waterfront of tall narrow merchant houses, amber shops and a Second World War museum that is world class. Sopot and the Baltic beaches are twenty minutes away by train.

Wroclaw. An enormous painted market square, twelve islands and over three hundred small bronze dwarf statues hidden around the city. Give your kids a dwarf map and the afternoon plans itself.

Malbork. The largest brick castle in the world, built by the Teutonic Knights, an hour from Gdansk by train. If you have a child who is into knights this is the single best day in Poland.

Zakopane and the Tatras. Wooden mountain architecture, cable cars, hiking in summer and skiing in winter, at a fraction of alpine prices. It is also very busy with Polish tripmakers, which is a good sign rather than a bad one.

Wieliczka Salt Mine. Thirty minutes from Krakow. Nine levels underground, chapels and chandeliers carved from rock salt, and about eight hundred steps. Kids love it and it is the obvious counterweight to a heavy day.

Auschwitz with children. The honest answer. The memorial itself asks that visitors be at least fourteen, and that is not a rule invented to be difficult. It is not gory and it is not staged. It is quiet, factual and cumulative, and the weight comes from scale. A hallway of shoes behind glass. A room of hair. What I still cannot put down is not something I saw once, it is something I understood slowly over two hours. A younger child will not process that. They will process fragments and take them home without a frame to hold them in. If your child is under fourteen, my advice is to go without them, or go together to Schindler’s Factory or the POLIN museum of Polish Jewish history in Warsaw instead, both of which teach the same history at a survivable distance. If your child is fourteen or older and wants to go, take them, prepare them the week before, and plan nothing for the rest of that day.

Balance a heavy day with a light one. This is the practical version of the point above. Wieliczka after Auschwitz. The dwarves in Wroclaw. The science center in Warsaw. Do not stack two memorials back to back with children, at any age.

Poland is a castle country. Malbork, Wawel, the Trail of the Eagles’ Nests. Cheap entry, big courtyards, plenty of room to run. This is the easy win with under tens.

Feeding a big family is almost free here. Milk bars, huge portions, pierogi that every child eats. A family of five eating out three times a day in Poland costs less than one restaurant dinner in Switzerland.

Pack for real cold outside summer. Poland gets properly cold and much of the sightseeing is outdoors and slow moving. Layers, hats, gloves, and the memorial sites have very little shelter.

How cheap it really is. Not cheap for Europe. Cheap. A sit down family dinner, a museum for five, a two hour train ride, all for less than one of those things costs in France.

How much of it is a reconstruction. Warsaw’s old town looks four hundred years old and is mostly seventy. Once you know, you cannot unsee it, and it becomes the most impressive thing about the city.

Do not drive into a Polish old town. Krakow’s center is closed to traffic and I found that out from inside it, on the tram tracks, in a vehicle the size of a bus. Park outside and take the tram.

How many visitors Auschwitz gets. I expected a quiet place among the farms. There were crowds, every language, every faith. That was not what I had prepared for and it turned out to be the hopeful part.