60TH ANNIVERSARY OF AUSCHWITZ UPRISING REMEMBERED

60th anniversary of Auschwitz uprising remembered
The 60th anniversary of the largest prisoner revolt at the former Auschwitz death camp was commemorated Thursday by a handful of Holocaust survivors who gathered with political officials to lay wreaths and proclaim the importance of remembrance.

Those gathered remembered the 451 Jewish Sonderkommando - camp laborers forced to help exterminate and burn other prisoners - who were killed for rising up against their SS guards. Henryk Mandelbaum, the only former Sonderkommando member alive in Poland today, said it was "a miracle" that he was able to escape when many died, the Polish news agency PAP reported.

"We are obliged for the sake of those no longer among us to give evidence and to warn," he said.
Near the ruins of crematorium IV where the revolt was launched, those attending held a moment of silence for the victims of the insurgency and for all Auschwitz victims, PAP said. The revolt began on Oct. 7, 1944, after rumors spread that the SS planned to kill 300 Sonderkommando members. When the SS arrived that afternoon to take prisoners, the Sonderkommando laborers rose up with hammers and axes. Prisoners from another crematorium cut the camp's barbed wire fence, ran out and barricaded themselves in a barn. The Nazis threw grenades at the barn, opened machine gun fire and later executed 200 survivors of the revolt.

Between 1 and 1.5 million Jewish prisoners perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at the camp outside of Oswiecim before it was liberated by advancing Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945. Overall, some 6 million Jews were killed in the Nazi Holocaust.