Word: camped
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Israel was one of a handful of survivors who joined dignitaries like Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu on Wednesday for an emotionally charged ceremony to mark the camp's liberation on Jan. 27, 1945, a date now commemorated as International Holocaust Remembrance Day. "It's hard to explain how I feel," Israel says. "I feel stress all over, my body shuts down, and I want to leave. But I must come back." (See pictures of Auschwitz 65 years...
...estimated 1.1 million people died at the camp - the vast majority of them Jews from occupied Europe. Most were killed in gas chambers. They accounted for about one-sixth of all the Jews exterminated during the Holocaust. Speaking to some 1,500 people gathered in a tent near one of the railroad tracks used to bring prisoners to the camp, Netanyahu described the genocide as "the greatest crime of humanity" and "the greatest tragedy in Jewish history...
...Inside the camp, Israel ambles through the thick snow with no gloves on a 2°F day, pointing to the sparse bunker where he slept crammed together with other prisoners on tiny bunks. Then, next to the railroad tracks, he spots the location where the "selection" process took place. This was where Nazi officers separated those deemed able to work from the other new arrivals, most of whom were immediately taken to the gas chambers. Israel, then 17, and his two brothers, Eli and Aaron, last saw their parents here. Within weeks, Israel's brothers would also be dead...
...When the Soviet Red Army liberated the camp, only a few thousand prisoners remained. Just a week earlier, Nazi officials had evacuated the facility, destroyed the camp's records and blown up the gas chambers. Most of the prisoners, some 60,000 of them, were then sent on a death march to other camps as their Nazi guards fled the Soviet advance. Israel was one of the marchers. He says they walked for about 60 miles in temperatures dipping to -10°F until they reached the town of Wodzislaw Slaski in southern Poland. "We only had our thin prison...
...leaves the camp on Wednesday, dusk is falling and the light from candles flickers on the snow. Looking back at the desolate, snow-covered compound, Israel winces. "We have to remember, always," he says. "But it's never easy...