Rich Robey

The post above is an example of Holocaust denial. See our page debunking many deniers’ lies. stopdenial.auschwitz.org Photographs of the greenhouses and laboratories at Rajsko are sometimes used in Holocaust-denial narratives to suggest that Auschwitz offered prisoners comfortable living conditions. This completely removes those images from their historical context. Learn about strategies employed by Holocaust deniers to spread misinformation and falsehoods. Online lesson: lekcja.auschwitz.org/negacjo… Podcast: auschwitz.org/en/education/e… Rajsko was a small agricultural subcamp located about 2.5 kilometers from the main camp. From June 1943, several hundred women prisoners were housed there and worked mainly in two areas: horticulture and experimental plant research. The greenhouses were not producing food for the general prisoner population. Vegetables, fruit and flowers were intended for the SS, their families and civilian workers, who could also purchase them at a sales point there. Another group of prisoners worked at an experimental station cultivating kok-saghyz, a rubber-producing plant. The aim was to develop a source of natural rubber useful to the German war economy. Many women assigned to this work were highly educated specialists in biology, chemistry or agronomy. Because the experiments required cleanliness, precision and skilled labor, conditions at Rajsko were considerably better than in Birkenau. Prisoners there had better opportunities for hygiene and clean clothing and were less exposed to some forms of everyday camp brutality. That relative privilege is an important part of the history and should not be concealed. But neither should it be transformed into evidence about Auschwitz as a whole. Rajsko involved only a few hundred prisoners performing specialized work for the SS and German economic interests. At the same time, only a few kilometers away, prisoners in Birkenau faced starvation, disease, forced labor and selections, while Jews arriving in mass transports were being murdered in the gas chambers.