OSWIECIM, Poland (AFP) — Nearly 8,000 people, mostly Jewish teenagers, took part Thursday in the 17th annual March of the Living from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Memorial Day.
Uniformly dressed in the blue and white colours of Israel, the walk -- which winds from the brick barracks of the former concentration camp at Auschwitz to the killing fields of Birkenau -- is a tribute to the estimated six million Jews who died at the hands of the Nazis during World War II.
Among the marchers this year were 85-year-old survivor Henryk Mandelbaum, Chelsea's Israeli coach Avram Grant, fresh from his team's qualification for European football's showpiece final, and Israeli author Eitan Haber.
Mandelbaum had been a member of the Sonderkommando, a prisoners unit tasked with clearing the gas chambers and burning the bodies of the victims.
The walkers set off at 1230 GMT after the blowing of the traditional shofar horn instrument which is used to mark important Jewish religious ceremonies.
At Birkenau, a man's voice read out the names of victims, children, women and Jewish men from all over Europe, with marchers reciting the Kaddish mourning prayer.
The March of the Living started in 1988 as a bi-annual event open only to Jews, but has been an annual event since 1995, with people of all faiths first invited to take part in the 1990s.
The largest procession to-date took place in 2005, when some 20,000 marchers attended.
The Nazis set up the Auschwitz camp mostly for members of the Polish resistance, nine months after invading Poland in 1939.
It was housed in what had been a Polish army barracks on the edge of the southern Polish town of Oswiecim -- named Auschwitz in German.
In 1941 the Nazis began constructing a vast complex of huts, gas chambers and crematoria on the site of the village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau. The deadly annex was fully operational by 1943.
Some 1.1 million people died at the death camp between 1940 and 1945 -- one million of them Jews from Poland and elsewhere in Nazi-occupied Europe -- some by overwork, starvation and disease, but most in the gas chambers.
Also among the victims of the camp were 85,000 non-Jewish Poles, 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, 20,000 gypsies and 12,000 non-Jewish citizens of other countries, including resistance fighters.
Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest camp in a vast Nazi network stretching across a swathe of occupied Europe.
According to its website, the March of the Living is an international, educational programme that also brings Jewish teens from all over the world to Israel to observe Yom HaZikaron, Israel Memorial Day, and Yom Ha'Atzmaut, Israel Independence Day.
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