Holocaust victims remembered at Auschwitz

Blue and white Israeli flags fluttered in the afternoon breeze as thousands marched in silence today 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 two-mile 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. 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.

Among the marchers was Shmuel Blumenfeld, 80, an Auschwitz survivor who made the trip from his home in Bat Yam, near Tel Aviv, Israel to lead a group of Israeli adults.

With a worn white cloth and star of David bearing prisoner number 108,006 pinned to his jacket, Blumenfeld recalled his trip to Birkenau in 1943 among some 2,000 prisoners from the Krakow ghetto.

“They dumped us at Birkenau, and we thought it was a factory, we had no idea it was a death camp,” he said. Blumenfeld, who was 16 at the time, carried dead bodies for a month before being sent to work in a nearby coal mine.

“I was with Polish and German miners, and some of them helped me,” he said. “I survived by pure luck, but also thanks to the help of civilians who sometimes gave me some food.”

After the war he married and moved to Israel. He joined the army and later worked as a prison guard, keeping watch over Nazi Holocaust planner Adolf Eichman before his execution in 1962.

“There are still people in the world who deny that there ever was the Holocaust, so it is my duty to come here and tell the young people what really happened, what I saw with my own eyes, what I went through,” Blumenfeld said.

“We don’t want this to happen to anyone ever again.”

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-Second World War Poland had a Jewish population of 3.5 million, most of whom were killed in the Holocaust, the mass murder of European Jews by the forces of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler.

Today, about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.