“OSWIECIM, Poland (CNN) — It looked just as it does in all the photos and films I’ve seen about Auschwitz. And the winds that blew across the fields, and the dusting of snow that fell the night before made the camp seem even starker than I’d imagined.
Yet nothing could prepare me emotionally as I walked through the main building of Birkenau — train tracks still passing under the main watchtower and through the “gate of death” — and entered what has been described as the largest Jewish cemetery in the world and one of the largest cemeteries of any kind, anywhere.
It is here, at Auschwitz II-Birkenau — the biggest of the camps that comprise Auschwitz — that the Nazis built their death factory in eerie order and massacred in a matter-of-fact way an estimated 1.1 million to 1.5 million people, most of them Jews of Eastern Europe.”
I found this story to be interesting. Sometimes it seems so far away and other days so close.
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