The Auschwitz III Monowitz exhibition

Monowitz was created in October 1942 at the construction of the synthetic rubber plant that IG Farbenindustrie was building at Dwory near Oświęcim. The concern needed workers on the spot, the main camp had a surplus of them, and the state took a daily rate for each one. The rest was a matter of arithmetic.

The number of prisoners grew from two thousand in November 1942 to more than eleven thousand in the second half of 1944. In November 1943 Monowitz was given the status of a separate camp, Auschwitz III, and took over supervision of the industrial subcamps in Upper Silesia. This is where Primo Levi was sent, and this is the camp he wrote about in the most famous book about Auschwitz.

The exhibition stands at Jawiszowice, while the camp it describes lay about ten kilometres away, at Monowice on the eastern side of Oświęcim. The exhibition is housed in one of the buildings of the former mine at Jawiszowice. It shows the industrial side of the camp: the companies, the contracts, the rates, and what became of those companies after the war.