Photo Special: Auschwitz – Then And Now

Auschwitz - Then And Now Gallery

Yesterday survivors and relatives of the executed gathered for ceremonies to mark the 65th Anniversary Of The Liberation Of Auschwitz.

An estimated 1.1 million people died at the concentration camp â€” 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.

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.

Speaking to some 1,500 people gathered in a tent near one of the railroad tracks used to bring prisoners to the camp, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu described the genocide as “the greatest crime of humanity” and “the greatest tragedy in Jewish history.”

Here’s a 36 picture gallery showing the camp then and now.