March 16, 2008

Nazi eradication of Krakow ghetto recalled

Hundreds of people joined two dozen Holocaust survivors, including several saved by German industrialist Oskar Schindler, in a march Sunday marking the 65th anniversary of the liquidation of the Krakow ghetto by the Nazis.

Family members, historians and Krakow residents and officials gathered with the survivors in a square in the heart of the former ghetto to say the Jewish prayer for the dead, the Kaddish.

The group then set out to retrace the steps of Jews driven from the ghetto during its 1943 liquidation to the forced labor camp in Plaszow about a mile away where some 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish Poles perished during the war.

Some survivors were making their first trip back to Poland since World War II.

On March 13, 1943, German soldiers started a two-day action in which they emptied the ghetto of its estimated 16,000 Jewish residents, shipping them to Plaszow and to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp. Some 2,000 Jews left behind were executed.

USA Today

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