AUSCHWITZ-BIRKENAU

Building in which...

A sub-camp in Prudnik near Nysa (Neustadt in German). It was founded in late September 1944 when about 400 women prisoners were brought from Auschwitz to work in the Schlesische Feinweberei AG textile mill. The prisoners were quartered on the second story of a building previously occupied by conscript laborers. The windows were barred, and a chain-link perimeter fence topped with barbed wire was erected. The women, mostly Jews from Hungary, worked on the spinning machines in the mill. Their labor may not have been as heavy as in some other sub-camps, but it was exhausting, and it combined with the starvation rations to lead to a rise in illness, sometimes fatal. The women who died were buried at the local Jewish cemetery. SS-Oberscharführer Bernhard Becker was the director and had 20 SS men at his disposal. In January 1945, the prisoners were evacuated on foot from the sub-camp to Gross-Rosen. 

Source: Auschwitz from A to Z. An Illustrated History