OSWIECIM (AFP).- Thousands of young Jews from 40 nations marched alongside a handful of Holocaust survivors and Polish teenagers Thursday in homage to the victims of the former Auschwitz-Birkenau WWII death camp in southern Poland.

Now a memorial and museum run by the Polish state, the site is symbolic of Nazi Germany's genocide of European Jews. One million perished there between 1940 to 1945.

Survivor Feiga Francis Schmidt Libman, 81, told AFP she lost her grandmother, aunt and cousins at Auschwitz.

Her father died at Dachau, another Nazi camp located in Germany, but she and her mother survived the ordeal of life in the Stutthof camp. She was just 10.

"I want them (young people) to know that hatred kills," Libman, now a great grandmother, told AFP.

"I have a motto: if you have hatred in your heart, there is no room for love. 

"I want everyone to be nice to each other and it doesn't matter if you pray in a synagogue, if you pray in a church or if you pray in a mosque. 

"We are all the same and we should love each other and try to get along because there is beauty and goodness in all of us."

The doleful sound of the "shofar" -- a traditional Jewish ram's horn symbolic of freedom -- marked the start of the march in brilliant sunshine in the southern Polish town of Oswiecim, where Nazi Germany built the death camp in 1940.

Participants walked through the notorious "Arbeit Macht Frei" (Work Will Set You Free) gate at Auschwitz, before marching two miles (three kilometres) to Birkenau, the main extermination site. 

Held for the 28th time, organisers say the annual March of the Living is the world's largest single Holocaust memorial event. 

It marks Yom Hashoah, Israel's Holocaust Remembrance Day.

"I'm afraid that Europe and maybe some other parts of the world didn't learn much (from the Holocaust)," Dr Shmuel Rosenman, march chairman, told AFP.

He urged governments to enact tough legislation "against anti-Semitism, racism, fascism."

Yossi Fischer, a 19-year-old New Yorker, told AFP that his great grandfather was the lone survivor among his relatives, all of whom perished at Auschwitz. 

"They tried to destroy us, but thank God we're still around."

More than 100,000 non-Jewish Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and anti-Nazi partisans also died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in occupied Poland. The Soviet Red Army liberated it in 1945.

Historical records show that six million European Jews perished under the Nazi German genocide during World War II. 



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