The Bor / Budy women's subcamp

Budy was one of the camp's farms, known as Wirtschaftshöfe. Male and female prisoners worked here in the fields, with the livestock and on land drainage. In June 1942, after one of the women escaped, the Germans imposed collective responsibility and turned the women's detachment into a penal company, a Strafkompanie.

A penal company meant the heaviest work, the worst food and constant supervision by prisoner functionaries brought in from German prisons. In the autumn of 1942 a crime took place here that almost nobody outside the specialist literature has heard of, and that ranks among the bloodiest in the whole history of Auschwitz.

The surviving building stands in a field, off to one side, and houses an exhibition. It is the place where you can see most clearly how the camp worked outside the camp: with no wire in sight, no watchtowers, in a landscape that today looks like an ordinary village.