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, disease and forced labour before Soviet troops liberated it on January 27, 1945.

After a solemn reading of the names of children who died at the camp, a shofar, or ram’s horn, sounded the march’s start. Mr Peres led the column through the wrought-iron camp gate bearing the infamous words “Arbeit Macht Frei”, or “Work Sets You Free” on the path to Birkenau.

Marchers arrived at the sprawling Birkenau complex with its wooden barracks and barbed wire fences, and gathered around the monument to the camp’s victims. With ruins of the crematoria and gas chambers to the left and right, youths again read out names of children killed at the camp.

Israel’s Education Ministry initiated the marches in 1988 to be held every other year, but since 1996 it has been held every year, coinciding with Israel’s Holocaust remembrance day.

Pre-World War II Poland had a Jewish population of 3.5 million, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews by Nazi forces. Today, about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.