SURVIVING AUSCHWITZ: Seventy-five years ago, Allied soldiers liberated the most notorious Nazi death camp.

• Author: Berger, Joseph

Paula Lebovics was 11 years old, starving, cold, and reduced to a near skeleton when soldiers from the Soviet Union entered the Auschwitz concentration camp a-nd were stunned by the horrors they saw--the piles of naked corpses, the emaciated, bedraggled survivors barely able to walk, the rubble of what looked like a death factory. One soldier picked Lebovics up and held her in his arms.

"He was sitting down and rocking me in his arms and tears were flowing down his face, and I can never forget that as long as I live," Lebovics said in an interview many decades later. "It was the first time I had this kind of feeling ... somebody caring about me."

Lebovics was one of the 7,000 frail or dying inmates the Soviet army discovered on January 27, 1945, when they liberated Auschwitz in Poland, the largest and most notorious of the concentration camps and killing centers set up by the Germans during World War II to extract slave labor for the military effort and to exterminate the Jews of Europe. More than 1.3 million people were sent to Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945. Of those, 1.1 million were murdered--1 million of them Jews, including 200,000 Jewish children.

This January will mark the 75th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation. American and British soldiers, allies of the Soviets in their battle against the Germans, also liberated concentration camps, infamous places like Buchenwald and Bergen Belsen. But Auschwitz's liberation holds a singular place in history because as the largest and most lethal of the death camps, it has become a near synonym for the wider Holocaust, in which 6 million Jewish people were murdered.

"Auschwitz has become an international symbol of evil," says Holocaust historian Michael Berenbaum.

Hitler & the Nazis

The creation of Auschwitz and its largest killing center Birkenau was the consummation of a plan hatched by Adolf Hitler and his followers to destroy the Jews of Europe. Hitler headed Germany's Nazi Party (Nazi was an acronym in German for National Socialist). In 1933, during a period of economic hardship and political turmoil, he was named chancellor.

Falsely scapegoating Jews for Germany's humiliating defeat in World War I (1914-18), he branded them an alien race that must be excluded from German society and progressively imposed a series of oppressive laws. Jews were forbidden from marrying non-Jews, working for the government, teaching, practicing law, owning most businesses, attending public schools, and voting.

The anti-Jewish campaign reached a horrific climax on two days in November 1938 known as Kristallnacht, the "Night of Broken Glass." Nazi mobs, with the cooperation of the police, torched synagogues, smashed Jewish shops, and murdered about 100 Jews. U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt condemned the violence but declined to ease immigration quotas, which would have permitted more German Jews to find refuge in the U.S.

In September 1939, the German army invaded Poland, starting World War II (1939-45). Within five weeks, the Poles surrendered. Conquests followed in Denmark, Norway, Belgium, the Netherlands, France, Greece, and Yugoslavia, and in June 1941 the Germans invaded the Soviet Union, then made up of states such as Russia and Ukraine that today are independent.

In scores of cities and towns that came under their sway, the Germans herded Jews into ghettos, crowding families together in apartments, limiting access to food, and deploying men and women in forced work gangs. German paramilitary forces, known as the S.S., as well as local collaborators, marched Jewish residents to remote areas, forced them to dig giant trenches, then shot or machine-gunned them, piling corpses into mass graves. T\vo million Jews were massacred in this way.

Life at Auschwitz

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