Babitz

Members of the Boys were slave labours in the Babitz labour camp, a subcamp of the Auschwitz concentration, extermination and labour camp complex.

The Auschwitz complex was operated by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland. The camp had 40 subcamps.

The Boys were teenage and child-Holocaust survivors, who were brought to the UK after the war for rest and rehabilitation.

^{Auschwitz-Birkenau – the main gate.}

History

The Babitz camp was located in the depopulated village of Babice, known in German as Babitz.

The camp opened in the first half of May 1943 and was within in the Auschwitz Zone of Interest. The village had been evacuated in 1941.

The camp was a subcamp of Auschwitz, which was located in the nearby occupied Polish city of Oświęcim.

The women prisoners were employed caring for and milking cows, clamping potatoes, spreading manure, and weeding and earthing up cabbages and beets. The male prisoners groomed the horses, ploughed, mowed hay, and harvested. When the army requisitioned some of the horses in the spring of 1944, women prisoners were harnessed to the ploughs with long ropes.

Structure

About 180 women were placed in the former school building, and an equal number of men in a nearby wooden barracks. The windows of the building occupied by the women were walled up or secured with barbed wire. Inside were sleeping rooms with bunk beds, offices for the SS men and female overseers, a first-aid room, a washroom, and a kitchen.

Food was delivered from the Birkenau camp. Two barns, a stable, storage sheds, and a shed for harnesses were built inside the barbed-wire fence.

The location of the Babitz camp facilitated prisoner contacts with the civilian population. Among the Poles living in the vicinity of the subcamp, there was an organized group of women who provided regular help to the prisoners in the form of food, medicine, and news from their families.

Dissolution & Liberation

At the end of July 1944, the female prisoners of Polish nationality were transferred back to Auschwitz II-Birkenau while the male prisoners and remaining female prisoners were evacuated on 17 January 1945 along with the prisoners from the main Auschwitz camps.

Aftermath

On the front wall of the school building in Babice there is a metal plaque erected in 2004 with an inscription in Polish.