22 C O N T E X T 1 0 8 : M A R C H 2 0 0 9 Plaszów forced labour camp The Plaszów camp was built in the southern suburbs of Krakow as a forced labour camp, but extended as a concentration camp under the supervision of Amon Göth, a brutal Austrian SS officer who was thought to have personally shot over 500 Plaszów Jews.The camp was on the site of the Krakowski and Podgórski Jewish cemeteries, which were destroyed along with Adolf Siódmak’s huge pre-burial hall. Inside the Plaszów camp prisoners worked in factories and quarries.The factory owners were offered incentives of free rent and a ready source of workers to set up there. The camp held over 25,000 prisoners at one time: Jews, Poles, Romanies, Italians, Hungarians and Romanians. The dismantling of the Krakow ghettos in 1943 led to the further incarceration at Plaszów of those surviving Jews capable of working. More than 80,000 Plaszów prisoners died by the end of the war, many having been sent to the gas chambers of Auschwitz-Birkenau, but over 8,000 people were actually killed there. As the Russians advanced on Krakow in 1945, the Nazis destroyed the camp and tidied away as best they could. The bodies from the mass graves were exhumed and burned. Today there is little to indicate the scale of operations at Plaszów or its harrowing history. It is little mentioned in guidebooks and not part of the visitor trail. A wild overgrown open space, strewn with litter, more home to dog walking than to commemoration, it is marked only by a sign at the entrance and a cluster of memorials, the largest a sculptural monument erected in 1964. Amid the scrubland few buildings survive: the foundations of some of the barracks, a cemetery building and Amon Göth’s villa, from where he was reputed to have taken pot shots at passing prisoners in the camp. There are now plans to enhance and protect the site. The Ministry of Culture proposes to take over management and give it national memorial status. A 2007 design by Krakow-based Proxima Design Group includes delineation of the boundaries, symbolic lighting of the footprint of the camp barracks, and a footbridge over the site to protect the ground and give visitors an overview. But even this (relatively) simple scheme has caused considerable local opposition. Developers object to the proposed restrictive buffer zone that memorial status will bring; local people object to the design; and Jewish groups object to the interpretation of the site to encourage tourists and especially to placing poles into ground that contains human remains. Auschwitz-Birkenau The industrial town of Oswiecim, some 45 miles from Krakow, housed Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest of the six Nazi concentration and extermination camps. The original buildings on the Auschwitz I site were constructed initially as barracks, becoming a concentration camp for Poles and Soviets. In 1941 work began at Auschwitz II-Birkenau, less than two miles away. Birkenau soon became the main mass extermination camp to implement the decisions of the 1942 Wannsee Conference, the ‘final solution of the Jewish question’. In the wider area a further 40 or so sub-camps, including the chemical works at Auschwitz III, were constructed. Although people were brought from all over Europe to Auschwitz, the first waves of prisoners were Poles, beginning with political prisoners and culminating in the shipment of large numbers of Polish Jews from the clearance of ghettos, such as the 2,000 people sent from the liquidation of Krakow in 1943. As the war drew closer to an end, further Polish prisoners were shipped to Auschwitz as the labour camps, like Plaszów, which had held them closed down. In October 1944 the 300 women from ‘Schindler’s list’ on their way to the safety of the factory at Brněnec-Brünnlitz were deported in cattle cars to Auschwitz. There they were held for three weeks and subjected to Dr Josef Mengele’s selection of those who were fit to work and those, around 70 to 90 per cent of new arrivals, who should be sent immediately to the gas chambers and crematorium. Intervention by Schindler, either directly or on his behalf, and a good deal of bribery and use of influence, got them released and sent on to Brněnec-Brünnlitz, to the factory the men were already constructing. This was one of very few shipments of prisoners to leave Auschwitz. In 1979 the site became the Auschwitz Concentration Camp World Heritage Site. In 2007 the inscription was changed to Auschwitz Birkenau, German Nazi The railway into Auschwitz II-Birkenau passes under the main guard house of 1943 to the selection platform, from where many were sent directly to the gas chambers.
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