Sites beyond the Museum routeOświęcim, Brzeszcze, Jawiszowice, Harmęże

Twelve sites we take groups to

Sites in the programmes
12

Auschwitz was not one place. It was a system of forty-five camps built into mines, steelworks and farms, and most of that landscape lies outside the route walked every year by more than a million visitors. Below are the twelve sites we take groups to. Each has its own page with a description, the facts and a note on which programmes it appears in.

The Judenrampe

Oświęcim, between Auschwitz I and Birkenau

For two years this was the main unloading ramp of the whole complex. Today one wagon stands on it and there is nobody here.

The food warehouses

Oświęcim, the food stores beside the Judenrampe

Brick halls right beside the ramp, from which the whole complex was supplied. The clearest proof that Auschwitz was a business.

The sauerkraut plant

Oświęcim, a processing plant for the camp

Cabbage and vegetables were pickled here for the camp. On paper light labour, in reality a sentence.

The Bor / Budy women's subcamp

Budy, commune of Brzeszcze

An SS farm beside which the Germans set up a women's penal company. The site of one of the worst crimes in the history of the camp.

The Auschwitz III Monowitz exhibition

Jawiszowice, an exhibition in a building of the former mine

A camp built for a single industrial concern, which in November 1943 became a main camp in its own right and took charge of several dozen subcamps.

The SS canteen

Oświęcim, 400 metres from the Arbeit macht frei gate

This is where the camp garrison drank beer and watched films. Beside it stands a historic freight wagon on the tracks of the first transports.

Remembrance Museum of Land of Oświęcim Residents

Oświęcim, a cultural institution of the Malopolska Region

The underground, smuggling medicine and food, helping those who escaped. Almost two thousand documented names of people who helped prisoners at the risk of their own lives and their…

The mine at Jawiszowice

Brzeszcze-Jawiszowice

The same shaft, the same cage. First Auschwitz prisoners, forty years later a strike against martial law.

The bathhouse of the Jawiszowice subcamp

Jawiszowice, about 500 metres from the mine

The surviving camp bathhouse and the grounds of one of the largest subcamps of Auschwitz.

The Labyrinth

Harmeze, the exhibition of Marian Kolodziej

Several hundred large format drawings by a prisoner of the first transport to Auschwitz. You do not look at them, you pass through them.

The house of Rudolf Hoss

Oświęcim, on the boundary of Auschwitz I

The house where the commandant of Auschwitz lived with his family throughout his service. The same one the world saw in The Zone of Interest.

The Oshpitzin Jewish Museum

Oświęcim, the Chewra Lomdei Mishnayot synagogue

Four hundred years of a town that existed long before the camp. The last Jewish resident of Oświęcim died in 2000.

Descriptions our own, based on fieldwork, on material from the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum in Oświęcim and on historical scholarship.