Zone of Interestthe core programme

The second part of the day shows that the camp reached far beyond the wire. The women's subcamp at Budy lies in open fields, with no watchtowers in sight, and one of the worst crimes in the history of Auschwitz is bound up with it. The exhibition at Jawiszowice brings in the industrial thread: a camp built for an industrial concern, in which everything was decided by arithmetic. The SS canteen closes the picture, because four hundred metres from the gate with the words Arbeit macht frei the camp garrison drank beer and watched films.

We finish at the Remembrance Museum and outside the commandant's house. The order is deliberate: first the system and its economy, then the people who lived inside that system on both sides of the wall. On one side almost two thousand documented names of local people who helped prisoners at the risk of their families' lives. On the other a house where the commandant ate dinner with his wife and five children.

What a participant learns along the way

• That Auschwitz was not one place but a network of forty five camps across what is today Poland, Czechia and Germany.
• What the Zone of Interest was: forty square kilometres of cleared land from which more than ten thousand people were removed.
• Where the camp's food came from and why hunger in this system was a decision, not a side effect.
• Who paid for a prisoner's labour, to whom and how much.
• That help for prisoners was an organised network, not a series of isolated impulses, and what the people who carried it risked.

This is only part of what we talk about during the programme.