About

Where this came from

We have been running the project since 2019. From the start it has been the work of enthusiasts, people who took up this subject after hours and out of their own need, long before any offer came out of it. It began with a question that had no good answer. Why does almost nobody speak about the dozens of camps that made up Auschwitz, when their traces stand a few kilometres from a place that more than a million people pass through every year.

Over the following years we went out to those places. We looked for them in the field, laid old maps over today's, talked to the people who look after them and to residents who remembered what stood where. Some of the sites we could enter only once somebody opened the gate. Out of that work came the register of the forty five subcamps, our visit outlines and everything on this site.

We began guiding only when there was something to show and something to support it with. To date we have taken several dozen groups, including school groups from Poland. That is still very few beside a place that more than a million people pass through every year, and that is precisely why this site exists at all.

Why we do it

The first reason is that this history is told only by half. Auschwitz without the subcamps is a story about a crime without the story of who profited from it. Without the mines, the steelworks and the refineries, without companies with boards and shareholders, without the accounting in which a human being was a cost item, it is impossible to understand what that system really was. Anyone who walks the main route comes out shaken, and that matters. But they also come out convinced that it all happened in one place, behind one fence, and that it was done by people entirely unlike themselves. The subcamps show something harder. That an economy worked around the camp, that somebody kept its books, somebody made the deliveries, somebody earned from it and somebody lived next to it.

The second reason matters more. Particular people worked and died in these places. At most of them there is today no plaque and no name on the map, and nobody stops there. To come with a group, to say what happened in this building, to name what is known about the people who passed through it and to stand for a moment in silence is a form of remembrance that does more than another text. Tens of thousands of prisoners passed through the forty five subcamps. They left no museum behind. They left foundations in a field, a bathhouse building in a municipal park and a headframe still standing over the same shaft.

We want these places to have a public. We want somebody to go there, to ask about them and to know their names. A place that people come to is harder to demolish, plough over or build on than a place nobody remembers.

Where this is heading

We want this project to become a foundation. Not for the name over the door, but because part of the work that has to be done here cannot be sustained from selling programmes. Documenting places nobody comes to. Describing camps whose names appear in no guidebook. Talking to the people who still remember, and writing it down before it is too late. Putting up a plaque where today there is nothing.

The educational programmes are what finances this project today. Every group that travels with us pays not only for its own day but also for the next place we manage to describe and open up. We do not give a date for the foundation, because it does not depend on us alone and we do not want to promise deadlines we cannot control. The direction, however, is certain, and we write about it plainly so that it is clear where the money from these trips goes.

How we behave in these places

These are not tourist attractions and we do not turn them into attractions. We do not walk onto private fields or into other people's buildings. We do not sell entry to the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, because that is not our role. We do not organise photo shoots, and we tell groups plainly where photographs are not taken. Access to sites that are normally closed is arranged with the people who look after them, and we keep to the conditions they set, because that decides whether the next group will be able to come in as well.

Who leads the programmes

The programmes are led by our own guides. They hold guiding qualifications and are at the same time enthusiasts of this subject, who have worked on it for years, also outside working hours.

One person leads the whole programme, from the first stop to the last, in the language of the group: Polish, English, Spanish or Portuguese. We do not hand the group over between guides during the day.

Where our content comes from

The visit outlines are entirely our own work. They were built from archival sources, from the knowledge of the institutions and the people who look after the individual sites, and from our own field documentation. We do not buy ready made scripts and we do not reproduce other people's studies.

The register of the forty five subcamps that we publish on this site is based on the data of the project Re-Finding the Sub Camps of Auschwitz run by the Tiergarten4Association. The dates, the employers and the prisoner numbers come from there; the descriptions and all the texts on this site are ours.

Who we work with

We run the programmes together with the institutions that care for these places, open them to visitors and keep the memory of the victims alive. It is thanks to their work that some of the sites on our route survived at all and can be entered today. Access is arranged in advance every time, because these sites are not open to the public.

Remembrance Museum of Land of Oświęcim Residents Auschwitz‑Birkenau Nearby Memorial Sites Foundation Oshpitzin — the Jewish Museum Auschwitz Education Institute

Organisational support and bookings for the project are handled by All in Krakow, an agency running tours and visitor services in Krakow.

Organisational support

Company details

Auschwitz Subcamps is a brand of KrakowOmnia sp. z o.o. The company is the organiser and operator of the programmes and the party to the contract with the client.

Name

KrakowOmnia sp. z o.o.

Registered office

ul. Rakowicka 10B/4, 31-511 Kraków, Poland

Register

District Court for Krakow Srodmiescie, XI Commercial Division of the National Court Register

KRS

0001046320

REGON

525890102

VAT

6751785068

Contact

office@auschwitz-subcamps.com

Personal data

The controller of the data given in the enquiry form is KrakowOmnia sp. z o.o., with its registered office in Krakow, ul. Rakowicka 10B/4, 31-511 Kraków, Poland. We process the data in order to answer the enquiry, prepare an offer and deliver the programme booked, on the basis of Article 6(1)(b) and (f) GDPR.

We do not sell the data and we do not pass it on beyond the providers who handle our mail, our payments and our accounts. We keep it for as long as the enquiry requires and, if a booking follows, for the period required by tax and accounting law.

You have the right to access your data, to have it corrected, erased or its processing restricted, the right to object to processing and the right to lodge a complaint with the President of the Polish Personal Data Protection Office. The newsletter sign-up is based on consent, which can be withdrawn at any time, with no reason given, by a single e-mail to the contact address.

Copyright and use of this content

Everything on this site was made by us: the descriptions of the sites, the records of the forty-five subcamps, the methodology of the register, the translations into four languages and the photographs. The photographs are our own, taken in the field. We do not publish archival photographs from the Archive of the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum. The rights to all of it belong to KrakowOmnia sp. z o.o.

What you may do without asking. You may read, print and use this material for study, for preparing lessons and for planning your own visit. You may quote us, giving the source and a link to the page the quotation comes from. You may link to any page of ours. Teachers and guides care about this in particular, which is why we are saying it plainly.

What needs our permission. Reprinting whole descriptions or records on another site, in a publication or in commercial material. Using our photographs beyond quotation. Copying the register as a dataset. Building a competing tourist offer on our content. We grant permission often and usually free of charge: write to office@auschwitz-subcamps.com and say what it is for.

We let language model crawlers in deliberately. We want the facts about the subcamps to be quoted, including by assistants. We ask them for the same thing we ask of people: name the source and link to it. Permission to read is not permission to reprint the whole thing under someone else's name.

If you see our texts or photographs somewhere without permission, write to us. We do respond, because behind these descriptions there is fieldwork and verification against the Museum's own material.