A Grim Reminder of the Holocaust

[Ralph]

Nazi camp ashes to be buried
5-foot-thick layer unearthed in memorial construction


ORANIENBURG, Germany (AP) -- The ashes of thousands of victims of the Nazis' Sachsenhausen concentration camp were to be buried Tuesday in a ceremony near the World War II camp.

A layer of ashes up to 1 1/2 meters (5 feet) thick was unearthed last year by archaeologists working on a concrete building constructed as a memorial near the camp's former crematorium.

Though impossible to establish the number or identity of the victims whose cremated remains were found, memorial officials have estimated that there were tens of thousands of bodies.

Some 200,000 people -- including political prisoners, captives from Poland, Soviet POWs as well as Jews -- were interned between 1936 and 1945 at Sachsenhausen, one of the first Nazi concentration camps in what became a sprawling network. Tens of thousands died there.

The ashes have been put into 150 urns, each with a capacity of 30 kilograms (66 pounds), and were to be interred in a joint Christian and Jewish ceremony at the crematorium site where they were found.

The burial comes ahead of commemorations next month marking the camp's April 22, 1945, liberation by the Red Army at which some 500 Sachsenhausen survivors are expected.

Advancing Soviet forces found about 3,000 survivors, most of them old and sick. Thousands of other prisoners died during the death marches that preceded Sachsenhausen's liberation as the SS evacuated most of the camp.

[aircanuck]

I always read things like that and wonder which one I'd be. Would I lay among the ashes, would I fall fictim on a death march or would I be one of the very few to live to tell the story?

Or would I be born in 1980 among a generation of people, that, for the most part, just don't get it?