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The all-female concentration camp Svatava (Zwodau) during the Nazi occupation covered 18 thousand square meters surrounded by barbed wire. Inside, from 1943, Jewish women and women involved in resistance from Czechoslovakia, France, Yugoslavia, Hungary, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland, and the Soviet Union were imprisoned, with their number reaching 750 in the final phase of the camp's existence. In the nearby Siemens Luftfahrgerätewerk (LGW) factory producing aviation instruments, they were forced into slave labor. From the end of 1944, Svatava also became a transit station for marches from other camps. The American army liberated Svatava on May 7th 1945.

After almost 80 years, archaeologists from the Faculty of Arts (FF ZČU) returned to the same place. They managed to delineate the exact location of the camp in today's terrain mainly thanks to photographs taken by U.S. Air Force reconnaissance planes at the end of World War II. The photos were provided by the American army, and they were then projected onto the current terrain. "We know that there were four guard towers in the corners of the camp and that it consisted of three large wooden houses for prisoners, as well as a camp infirmary, kitchen, fuel storage, and a water reservoir. In the central part, there was the so-called Appelplatz, and there was also an underground air raid shelter, which was also used for punishing prisoners," explains the head of the research, Pavel Vařeka from FF ZČU.

Only about 10 percent of the total area of the subcamp was declared a cultural monument in 1958, on which a memorial is placed in Svatava. The rest of the concentration camp area was largely built over in the post-war period. "The geophysical survey revealed well-preserved subsurface remains of the camp kitchen, which our archaeological research focuses on. We want to obtain material evidence of the living conditions in the camp and artifacts that can provide tangible testimony about the prisoners," added Pavel Vařeka. The excavation is being carried out with students of archaeology from ZČU and Cambridge University.

The archaeological research is also a significant event for the township of Svatava. "The camp was completely burned down shortly after the war, and the small collection of artifacts that were preserved is all in the museum in Sokolov. The archaeological survey is one of the few opportunities to learn something new about it and the imprisoned women," said the mayor of the township, Eva Třísková. Svatava was the largest women's labor camp in the Czech Republic. "Together with historians and the memory of the nation, we have been trying since 2022 to create a dignified memorial place here for future generations, commemorating the fate of the imprisoned women and the war crimes that should not be forgotten, especially in today's time when we might have felt that nothing like this could ever happen again," she adds.

The research is part of the Czech-Polish project named "Biological Anthropology and Landscape Archaeology of Nazi Repression: Central-Eastern European Perspective" supported by the Grant Agency of the Czech Republic and the Polish National Science Center. The project aims to study neglected material evidence of Nazi repressions, especially the remains of lesser-known subcamps, using the examples of western Bohemia (subcamps of Flossenbürg) and Silesia (subcamps of Gross Rosen).