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ianstone
06-14-2010, 08:16 PM
Survivors Retrace First Convoy To Auschwitz



7:48pm UK, Monday June 14, 2010
Tim Hewage, Sky News Online
Auschwitz survivors and relatives have retraced what was for many to be their final route to the Nazi concentration camp in Poland exactly 70 years after the first journey.



http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2010/Jun/Week2/15649131.jpg From 1940-45 over 1.1 million people were killed at Auschwitz-Birkenau


The journey started in the Polish town of Tarnow and retraced the 87-mile route to Oswiecim, site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp.
Before boarding, the group attended a ceremony at a monument unveiled on Tarnow's station platform bearing the names of the 728 prisoners who were sent to the camp on June 14, 1940.
Only 300 returned from the Nazi death camps.
Kazimierz Zajac, an 86-year-old survivor of the convoy, recalled: "They told us we were being sent to a concentration camp, but none of us knew then what a concentration camp was."


http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2010/Jun/Week2/15649135.jpg Prisoners arrive on train carriages at Auschwitz in 1940


On the first convoy the Nazis used subterfuge to keep the prisoners calm.
"They told us we were being sent to Germany as farm labourers. On the train, no one beat us," Jozef Stos, an 89-year-old survivor, said.
On arrival, the Nazis tattooed numbers onto the prisoners' arms.
Mr Zajac said the captors' message was stark: "Jews won't live for more than a month, priests for three months and for the others, the only way out is up the crematorium chimney".


http://news.sky.com/sky-news/content/StaticFile/jpg/2010/Jun/Week2/15649136.jpg People gather in Jan 2010 to mark the 65th anniversary of the camp's liberation


After suffering beatings and torture, the inmates were put to work as forced labourers extending the camp.
Later expanded into a purpose-built death camp for Jews, Auschwitz was initially built to hold Polish resistance fighters and leaders.
Nearby Birkenau opened in early 1942, and its gas chambers became the hub of the "Final Solution", the Nazi genocide of six million Jews across Europe.






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Survivors Retrace First Convoy To Auschwitz







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