<p>"Do not let us down," Auschwitz survivor, Anita Lasker-Wallfisch, now 95, said in an appeal to young people for International Holocaust Remembrance Day.</p><p>"Do not allow the memory to be distorted and poisoned by the ugly resurgence of xenophobia and anti-Semitism.</p><p>"By denying these victims and poisoning ourselves with hatred we are murdering these victims a second time over," she said at the ceremonies, held online only for the first time due to the coronavirus pandemic.</p><p>"Build bridges, talk to each other, celebrate your differences because in reality we have more in common than separates us," Lasker-Wallfisch added.</p><p>All told, Nazi Germany deported around 232,000 children to Auschwitz, including 216,000 Jews, 11,000 Roma, 3,000 Poles and the rest from Russia, Ukraine and elsewhere, according the to Auschwitz-Birkenau museum.</p><p>Only some 700 were still alive when the Soviet Red Army liberated the camp on January 27, 1945.</p><p>Part of Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's plan of genocide against European Jews, dubbed the "Final Solution", Auschwitz-Birkenau operated in the occupied southern Polish town of Oswiecim between June 1940 and January 1945.</p><p>- Babies 'killed on the spot' -</p><p>Of the more than 1.3 million people imprisoned there, around 1.1 million -- mainly European Jews -- perished, either asphyxiated in the gas chambers or claimed by starvation, exhaustion and disease.</p><p>In all, the Nazis killed six million of pre-war Europe's estimated 10-11 million Jews.</p><p>Zdzislawa Wlodarczyk, who was among the several hundred children still alive when the Red Army arrived at Auschwitz, said that babies born there were also put to death.</p><p>"Children were born in the camp, but they were not allowed to live because they were killed on the spot," Wlodarczyk, now 88, said during the online ceremonies.</p><p>"They didn't have names and they didn't even have numbers. How many of these children died? Why? Were we enemies of the Third Reich?", she added.</p><p>From mid-1942, the Nazis systematically deported Jews from across Europe to six camps -- Auschwitz-Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno, Majdanek, Sobibor and Treblinka.</p><p>Auschwitz-Birkenau was the largest Nazi death and concentration camp, and the site where the most people were killed.</p><p>Victims were primarily European Jews, but also Roma, gays, Soviet prisoners of war and Poles.</p><p>© 2021 AFP</p>
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