Auschwitz survivors tell of terror and liberation

Survivors, some with grown children – and others there to honour the millions killed by the Nazis – moved among the barracks and watchtowers of Auschwitz and Birkenau, neighbouring camps that stand as powerful symbols of the Holocaust.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu joined Polish leaders for commemorative ceremonies at Birkenau, the larger of the two camps, where about a million Jews were murdered.

The tribute marks the day the Red Army liberated the camp in 1945, and is part of worldwide events on International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

One survivor, Jadwiga Bogucka, an 84-year-old Pole sent to Auschwitz in August 1944 in mass retribution against Warsaw residents for an uprising against Nazi rule, recalled that the weather was similar to January 27, 1945, when she woke up and found that the Nazis had fled.

"It was all covered in snow and it was very cold. There was no gong as usual for breakfast that morning but the previous night there had been the usual terror, or even worse – the roll call, the screaming of the SS men," said Mrs Bogucka, who was 19 at the time.

"I left the barrack to see what was going on (and) there were dead

bodies everywhere because the Germans had shot anyone still able to move or who tried to flee."

At the Vatican, the German-born Pope spoke of "the horror of crimes of unheard-of brutality that were committed in the death camps created by Nazi Germany."

And Israeli President Shimon Peres addressed the German parliament, calling for the surviving perpetrators of the Holocaust to be brought to justice.