Last week marked the 62nd anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz –Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland by the Soviet armed forces, which took place on January 27, 1945. At the behest of the UN and the initiative of the former Secretary General of the UN, Kofi Annan, the United Nations has asked the international community to designate the anniversary of the liberation as a day for commemoration.
Today there are only a few survivors who have adult memories of Auschwitz. Soon there will be none. This makes it all the more important that the memory of what happened there is preserved. In part through commerative events such as those that took place last week.
More than one million people in cold blood as part of the calculated campaign of extermination that is now called the Holocaust.
The world now knows that when Hitler told the Reichstag on the 30th of January, 1939, that a second world war would end with Vernichtung die Judische rasse in Europa, (the extermination of the Jews in Europe), he meant it. The overwhelming majority of those killed in camps were Jews, transported in freight cars to the site form almost country in Europe, to be exterminated in gas chambers or worked to death in near by mines and factories, their bodies incinerated, and their ashes thrown into a lake.
The total number killed in the seventeen extermination camps was at least 3.2 million, and possibly 3.8 million. These camps thus accounted for about half the total number of Jews killed in the entire Nazi Holocaust. Virtually the whole Jewish population of Poland died there. To them were added Jews from the Czech and Slovak lands, from France and Belgium and the Netherlands, from Greece and Italy, Romania and Serbia. Finally in late 1944, 400,000 Hungarian Jews were sent to Auschwitz following the German occupation of Hungary. In addition, in the Nazi occupied Soviet Union, including the Baltic Shores, had more than 1 million Jews were killed on the spot by the Einsatzgruppen.
At Auschwitz, as the Red Army approached, the SS evacuated the camp on January 17 and 18 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners were marched westwards through the freezing landscape to other camps, such as Gross-Rosen, Mauthausen, Bergen-Belsen and Buchenwald in Germany.
Thousands of freezing, half-starved prisoners died in the snow in these futile marches.
On January 27, 1945, soldiers of