death camps

Description

Over a thousand Warsaw residents and members of the local Jewish community took part in a ceremony commemorating the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto during World War II, when residents of the ghetto were sent to Nazi death camps. The ceremony took place at memorial standing on the site from which trains carrying Warsaw residents of Jewish origin departed to death camps in Europe. Warsaw chief rabbi Michael Schudrich: "If we stand together even though it's 70 years, maybe too late, but never too late. But at least we stand together now. We make it one step less possible that such a horrible thing could happen again to the Jewish people or to anyone else. And even though there are still such things as what has happened in Burgas where five Jews were murdered for just being Jewish, but now at least the world is reacting. Let the world react. And what we are seeing here is finally the lesson that you have to react and even if it's just a small thing as taking a march from one place to another, we have to react." Holocaust survivors were also in attendance saying that although the numbers of survivors is now declining remembrance ceremonies remain a vital mark of respect to remembering one of history's worst atrocities. Holocaust survivor Andrzej Kazmierczak: "I was born in the concentration camp Stutthof and because the Nazi Germans didn't know the nationality of my mother, this saved my life. After the camps liberation, after my father was shot in the camp, my mother left thinking I was killed with Phenol, on the other hand I thought my mother was shot in the camp. Even after 17 years of searching, I never managed to meet my biological mother and I was raised by a Polish family. I grew up to be an adult with grey hair and an education and I consider it my duty to attend these ceremonies." As many as two million people were killed during the German Nazi operation to exterminate Polish Jews, code named "Operation Reinhardt", one of the most deadly chapters of the Holocaust which lasted from 1941 to 1943.