Pictured here are Jewish women prisoners on their way to forced labor 1943-1944 in Plaszow. The Plaszow camp was set up in the fall of 1942 as a forced labor camp for the Jews of neighboring Krakow. It was run by the local SS headquarters, but until its transformation into an official SS concentration camp on 11 January 1944, most of its guards were Ukrainians. Following its transformation into a concentration camp, Hungarian and Slovak Jews were brought there too. From May 1944, traffic in and out of the camp increased greatly as Plaszow served as a transit camp for Jews on the way to Auschwitz and other camps. Prisoners only stopped arriving in the fall of 1944, when evacuation of the camp commenced. In September 1944, as part of the operation to downsize and eventually dismantle the camp, a special SS unit opened up the mass graves on site and burned the bodies, thereby erasing all evidence of the atrocities committed .

The last remaining Jews were sent from Plaszow to Auschwitz on 17 January, 1945, just three days before the Red Army reached Krakow.

The Germans forced Plaszow inmates to work in a large number of factories, both within and outside the camp. Oskar Schindler, a German industrialist and businessman, owned an enamel factory in the Zablocie industrial zone, in the south part of  Krakow, and employed Jews from the ghetto to work there until the ghetto’s liquidation in mid 1943. After that, he turned his factory into a sub-camp of Plaszow, and in this way, was able to save about 900 Jews from the camp.

Click here to see aerial photos of the camp

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