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| By: Associated Press |
| Published: April 25, 2006 |
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Thousands of people were gathering Tuesday at the site of the Auschwitz death camp to remember the victims of the Holocaust with a solemn march.
Shimon Peres, the former Israeli prime minister and a Nobel peace laureate, was to lead 8,000 people, mostly students, in the annual March of the Living, a three-kilometer (two-mile) trek from Auschwitz to the larger neighboring 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 labor before Soviet troops liberated it on Jan. 27, 1945.
Before the march's start, hundreds of youths carrying blue and white Israeli flags spent the morning wandering among the wooden barracks and barbed wire of the sprawling Birkenau camp, and visited the museum housed at the smaller Auschwitz camp nearby.
Among those taking part was Diana Katz, a 23-year-old history teacher from Jerusalem, whose grandmother, Lubia Tanenbaum, survived the camp after arriving as a 14-year-old from Hungary.
"I am here with my son to show the evil people in the world that we are here, that we are alive, that we want to live and we want future generations to live," Katz said as she pushed the baby carriage holding her three-month old son, Joseph. "We will not forget, and we have won."
Israel's Education Ministry initiated the marches in 1988 as a biannual event, 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 murder of 6 million Jews by the forces of German dictator Adolf Hitler. Today, about 20,000 Jews live in Poland.
At last year's march, then-Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon called on participants to "remember how millions of Jews were led to their deaths and the world remained silent." Sharon has been in a coma since suffering a massive stroke on Jan. 4. |
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