Today marks International Holocaust Remembrance Day. 11 years ago the United Nations General Assembly designed the day to commemorate Holocaust victims which also coincides with the liberation of the biggest extermination concentration camp Auschwitz-Birkenau. The Auschwitz death camp was first built to hold Polish political prisoners. From 1942 trains transported people from all over Nazi occupied Europe to the camp’s gas chambers, were over 1.1 million people died, nearly a million of them Jewish. As many of the prisoners were not registered and large amount of evidence destroyed by SS units in the final days of the war, it is uncertain the exact number of people murdered. In 1947 the Polish Communist government built a museum on the Auschwitz site, and in 1979 the memorial was named a UNESCO World Heritage Site.
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