Jews Remember Horrors of Auschwitz : Poland: Hundreds meet on eve of liberation’s anniversary. Their solemn gathering precedes official ceremonies.

OSWIECIM, Poland —  Fire burned once again Thursday amid the twisted steel and crumbled bricks that half a century ago served as crematories at the Auschwitz concentration camp.

But this time the flames were candles lighted by Jews to honor the memory of the more than 1.1 million people, most of them Jews, who died here during World War II.

“If those who were here could raise their voices, it would sound like a deafening scream,” said a weeping Halina Brill, a Polish-born Jew who scaled the rubble to light a candle for her sister, a victim of a nearby gas chamber.

“That is what we can hear as we walk here now,” said Brill, who lives in Sweden. “The screaming.”

Hundreds of Jews from around the world, many of them frail survivors of this and other Nazi death camps, gathered here on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Auschwitz’s liberation. A Ukrainian division of the Soviet Red Army freed the camp from the retreating Germans on Jan. 27, 1945, ending nearly five years of torture and murder at the largest extermination center known to humankind.

Two days of official ceremonies have been planned by Polish authorities, with the main events scheduled for today. But some Jews complained that the Polish program did not place enough emphasis on the suffering of Jews, who historians estimate accounted for 90% of the victims at Auschwitz.

In response, Jews organized the solemn gathering Thursday at Birkenau, the sprawling section of Auschwitz where most Jewish prisoners lived and where the gas chambers and adjoining crematories were the scenes of their deaths.

Although the Nazis destroyed them before abandoning the camp, the toppled crematories remain a ghastly reminder of the industrialized slaughter that has made Auschwitz synonymous with evil, hatred and murderous anti-Semitism.

“Fifty years after the end of the apocalypse, after the end of the darkness and shame, we must not forget: This war, unique to humanity, was a war against the Jews,” said Jean Kahn, president of the European Jewish Congress.

A somber procession of several hundred Jews entered the Birkenau camp through the main gate, the entrance where hundreds of thousands of Jews and other prisoners had arrived in railway cars more than five decades ago. The commemorators, some in wheelchairs and others leaning on canes and crutches, made their way several hundred yards to the crematories at the far end of the camp.

In symbolic defiance of their Nazi oppressors, they wore prayer shawls and carried Israeli flags as they retraced the final steps of many doomed Auschwitz prisoners. They walked aside barbed-wire fences, beneath wooden lookout towers and past rows of dilapidated barracks.

Once at the crematories, they laid wreaths and flowers, lighted candles and prayed aloud--in Yiddish, Hebrew, German, Polish and English.

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“God of forgiveness, do not forgive those murderers of Jewish children here, do not forgive the murderers and their accomplices,” prayed Elie Wiesel, a camp survivor and Nobel Peace Prize winner who headed the official U.S. delegation. “Remember the nocturnal processions of children, and more children, and more children. Frightened. So quiet. And so beautiful. And if you could simply look at one, your heart would break. Did it not break the hearts of the murderers?”

As the prayers came to a close, young families, gray-haired couples and groups of youths moved silently through the broken crematories and a nearby monument to the dead.

“Something drives me to come here,” said Aron Kleinlehrer, a Polish-born Jew now living in Australia, whose mother and sister died at Auschwitz. “I can’t explain it. As I walk, I look to the ground, and I see the blood of my mother and sister.”

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