Several thousand people including Holocaust survivors and Israeli youth walked from the World War Two death camp of Auschwitz to the Birkenau camp on Thursday, to commemorate Holocaust Memorial Day.
The March of the Living began at the main gate of the Auschwitz death camp, with the playing of a ram's horn and ended in Birkenau, a second part of the Nazi death camp built later into World War II for the purpose of exterminating Europe's Jewish population, together with representatives of other nationalities.
Rick Carrier still remembers his thoughts when he liberated the Nazi death camp Dachau in April 1945. "My mind was just going: how do I solve this? I'm a liberator. So I've got to liberate. And this is my solution to a liberation process and they way the people of the World can be their own liberators. Simply by saying: you, you are a dictator and you should not live. Get out of here, get out of our lives. And you get millions of people doing that and it'll happen,"
Carrier said after a ceremony in front of a memorial for Holocaust victims in Brzezinka. Between 1.2 and 1.5 million people died at the Auschwitz and Brzezinka camps, of whom about one million were Jewish. Other groups of people who died included Polish political prisoners, Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals, people with disabilities and prisoners of conscience or religious faith.
Reuters
