Sector BIa was the women's camp. Halina Birenbaum arrived at the Alte Judenrampe in the summer of 1943 — the freight ramp that served the whole camp complex, located between Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II–Birkenau. From there she was sent directly into Birkenau, and spent her two-week quarantine in block 15 of this sector. The meadow adjacent to these barracks is where women were driven out daily; from it, Birenbaum could see the chimney of Crematorium II smoking across the camp, beyond the wire. Most of the wooden barracks that stood in this sector are gone. The foundations and brick chimneys visible beyond the surviving barrack in the photograph are what remains of them.
Halina Birenbaum, Hope Is the Last to Die, trans. David Welsh (Oświęcim: Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum, 2017; first published as Nadzieja umiera ostatnia, Warsaw: Czytelnik, 1967).
Provenance · Integrity Record
Canonical processed file hashes · SHA‑512
Hashes are of the byte-identical JPEGs converted from raw sensor data. Verify with sha512sum -c SHA512SUMS.
