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uhzw Israeli PM honours Holocaust victims_142

Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor and Tel Aviv resident Baruch Shub, 85, said he still bore the emotional scars of his suffering.

It became a site primarily for murdering Jews from 1942 as the Nazis expanded it at Birkenau, three kilometres (two miles) away.

In Krakow, Martynushkin told AFP he was marked by that fateful day.

“The Holocaust is the tragedy which unites Europe,” European Jewish Congress leader Moshe Kantor said on the eve of the Krakow ceremony, which US President Barack Obama was due to address by video.

A total of 1.1 million people perished at the camp - one million of them Jews from across occupied Europe - mostly killed in gas chambers but also by shootings, hangings, starvation, disease, slave labour and medical “experiments”.

“This is not an easy encounter but it gives us hope and direction for our future. May God avenge the victims,” said the Israeli leader alongside his wife Sara,mbt shoe, whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were murdered.

In addition to Jews, and 70-75,000 non-Jewish Poles, they killed 21,000 Roma there, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 10-15,000 others, including resistance members arrested across Europe, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.

“But we didn’t know what it was. We only understood after the war,” he added.

Tel Aviv’s Polish-born Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust orphan who survived as a child in Nazi camps, was to recite the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer of mourning.

In the Polish capital Warsaw Tuesday, Israeli prime minister Netanyahu honoured the victims and those who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.

Only a handful of the liberators are still alive. Two, Ivan Martynushkin, 86, and Yakov Vinnochenko, 83, were scheduled to attend.

Auschwitz, liberated by the Soviet Red Army on January 27,hair straightners, 1945, is an enduring symbol of Nazi German genocide. In 2005 the United Nations declared the date International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

With their numbers dwindling year by year, about one hundred survivors were set to attend Wednesday’s ceremony in sub-zero temperatures similar to the weather 65 years ago.

“We started meeting huddles of people. They came towards us, in prison stripes. Some had covers over their heads. We could only see their eyes. And in those eyes, we could see what they were feeling,” he said.

There were only around 7,ugg sales,000 survivors in the camp at the liberation. The Nazis had evacuated some 60,000 others only days earlier in the notorious “Death March” as they fled the Soviet advance.

“There’s a lot of sorrow, because when I came home, I found nobody in my family alive. But also a bit of happiness because the war was over and I’d somehow stayed alive,” Shub told AFP.

Israeli PM honours Holocaust victims