Although government mandated race-based atrocities had been taking place since before 1938, in 1941/42 the scale of what came to be identified as the Holocaust intensified massively. Erna Raus's racial classification meant that once the police in Vienna had finished their questioning, she was unlikely to be released. Instead, on 15 April 1944 she was individually transported to the camp complex at Auschwitz, in the hills to the south of Katowice (Upper Silesia). She arrived at the camp accompanied by the ominous official tag "Rückkehr unerwünscht" ("Return not wished for"). Initially she was set to heavy outdoor work, cutting squares of turf. The conditions made her ill and she was transferred temporarily to the "sick block". She was then set to work in the "cleaning barracks" where new arrivals, many of whom had come from other camps and/or prisons, were to be cleansed of their more readily removable afflictions. According to one source, the focus of her work was on "delousing". Like many Auschwitz prisoners she contracted Dysentery, but as far as her health permitted it she did what she could to use her "delousing" work to try and find ways to help fellow prisoners, many of whom were far more ill than she. Sources also mention her continuing resistance activism in the camp, without spelling out details of what was involved. Erna Raus continued to work in the camp "cleaning barracks" almost till the end of 1944, by which time, with the Soviet army approaching - apparently unstoppably - from the east, the Auschwitz camps were being cleared of inmates.