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Survivors mark 70th anniversary of Auschwitz liberation

A woman who was sent to the camp as a teenager said she survived because another prisoner told her to lie and say she was 15.

By Frances Burns
Jews in Nazi Germany and in countries occupied during World War II were ordered to wear a yellow star. This one is on display at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI
Jews in Nazi Germany and in countries occupied during World War II were ordered to wear a yellow star. This one is on display at the Yad Vashem Holocaust Museum in Jerusalem. Photo by Debbie Hill/UPI | License Photo

OSWIECIM, Poland, Jan. 27 (UPI) -- Aging survivors of the Auschwitz concentration camp gathered Tuesday for the 70th anniversary of its liberation.

On January 27, 1945, Soviet troops entered the camp, outside the city now known as Oswiecim in southern Poland. About 300 survivors were there for Tuesday's commemoration.

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The day is now International Holocaust Day.

Renee Salt, 85, who lives in London, told the BBC that she first returned to the camp 10 years ago and has been back several times since.

"I'll do it for as long as I can. Why? There are still a lot of Holocaust deniers, the world over, and if we don't speak out, the world won't know what happened," she said.

Susan Pollack, gathered with other survivors Monday night at a hotel in Krakow, the nearest large city, told the Independent her life was saved when she arrived at the camp by another Hungarian prisoner who instructed her in a whisper to say she was 15. As a 14-year-old, she would have been immediately marched to the gas chambers.

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"It was like being placed in some freezing water when you can't move and you can't do anything because you must not speak, you must not act, you must not respond. We were just dazed. That's what they had done to us," she said.

Rainer Hoess, grandson of the camp commandant, Rudolf Hoess, traveled to Poland for the anniversary. Hoess, whose grandfather was hanged after the war, said it was an opportunity to "make amends."

President Francois Hollande heads the French delegation and President Joachim Gauck the German one. The U.S. and British delegations are led by cabinet members, Treasury Secretary Jack Lew and Communities and Local Government Minister Eric Pickles.

One absentee is Russian President Vladimir Putin, currently involved in a dispute with Poland over Russia's actions in Ukraine. Putin said he was not invited, while the Polish government said countries were told any officials who wished could attend.

The Russian Defense Ministry released documents Tuesday, including a description by the genera in command of the troops that liberated the camp on what he found there.

"They all look extremely exhausted, grey-haired old men, youths, women with young babies and teenagers, nearly all of them half-naked," Gen. Kramnikov of the 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front wrote in his report. "The first indications are that in Auschwitz hundreds of thousands of prisoners have been worked to death, burned or shot dead."

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In New York, the annual ceremony at the United Nations was moved to Wednesday because of a blizzard. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon issued a statement on the more than a million people who were killed at Auschwitz, mostly Jews but also non-Jewish Poles, captured Soviet soldiers, political prisoners, homosexuals, the disabled and Sinti and Roma, the people once known as Gypsies.

"Unprecedented in human history, this mass killing was motivated by the perverse, race-based ideology of the Nazis, who sought to track down and kill every last Jew and any others they considered to be inferior," Ban said.

Ban linked the anniversary to continuing violence aimed at racial minorities and others.

"The violence and bias we see every day are stark reminders of the distance still to travel in upholding human rights, preventing genocide and defending our common humanity," he said.

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