A symbol of terror, suffering and death

A SHROUD of snow covered the ground where the ashes of more than a million people lay.

Beyond the memorial stones, the ruins of Nazi gas chambers were silhouettes against a leaden sky.

Within the barbed-wire fences, punctuated by watchtowers, survivors of Auschwitz gave witness to the horrors of the Holocaust. And yesterday they came back to commemorate the dead and to celebrate the defeat of tyranny.

Sixty years ago to the day, Ukrainian Red Army soldiers threw open the gates of the death camp and led survivors to freedom.

Then as now, the Polish winter was harsh. The ragged, striped uniforms and wooden clogs of weak and diseased inmates were no protection against the extreme cold.

And yesterday, 1,000 survivors returned.

Even in their late-seventies, the survivors endured sub-zero temperatures, wind and snow to commemorate the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the death camp at Auschwitz, near Krakow.

Survivors wore striped hats, part of their death-camp uniform. On their coats they pinned their prisoner numbers.

It is a wonder that they were able to withstand the cold. But their determination to warn the world that anti-semitism still threatens the universal values of humanity was etched in their frozen faces.

As Hitler’s henchman Adolf Eichmann put into practice the so-called Final Solution victims were transported to the Third Reich’s biggest death camp in Nazi-occupied Poland.

Within an hour of arrival victims, usually women and children and men unable to work, would be dead.

Prisoners selected to live as slave labourers, until they too would be killed, saw the flames in the Nazi furnaces and smoke rising from the crematoria.

SS guards and Gestapo thugs would greet new arrivals: “You are now in Auschwitz - the only way out is through a chimney.”

Auschwitz is the site of the greatest mass murder in history. It is a symbol of terror, unimaginable suffering and death.

As the Allies closed in on Germany’s defeated armies, at the conclusion of the Second World War, the SS attempted to destroy the evidence of their evil.

But the Nazis failed. Survivors lived to tell of the inhumanity and the ruins of gas chambers and of a crematorium remain.