Holocaust march remembers victims

BLUE and white Israeli flags fluttered in the afternoon breeze as thousands marched in silence yesterday between two former Nazi death camps in Poland, paying homage to the six million Jews killed during the Holocaust.

Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and a Nobel peace laureate, led 8,000 people, mostly students, in the annual March of the Living, a three-kilometre trek from Auschwitz to the larger neighbouring camp at Birkenau, which housed most of the killing complex’s gas chambers.

Some 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also Poles, Gypsies and others, died in the Nazi camp’s gas chambers or from starvation,