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Interview: Similar calamity should never happen again: Croatian Auschwitz survivors

Xinhua, January 28, 2015 Adjust font size:

"As long as we are telling young generations what really happened in Nazi concentration camps 70 years ago, they will understand and will avoid similar calamities from happening again," Branko Lustig, a Holocaust survivor, told Xinhua in a recent interview.

Lustig, the producer of the Oscar-winning movie Schindler's List, is a member of Croatian delegation in Auschwitz, Poland, attending a commemoration of 70th anniversary of the camp's liberation on Tuesday.

He spent more than two years in the concentration camp as a boy before the Soviet army liberated the camp.

Lustig said instead of reigniting the flames of hatred, "we honor the victims of the Holocaust for remembering history and drawing lessons from it."

Although many of his family members, including his grandfather and father, were killed in the camps, the veteran film-maker believes love is the only way to avoid the tragedy from repeating.

"We, all of us, must understand each other, love each other and thus we will live together in harmony," he said.

Boris Braun, another Holocaust survivor aged 95, joins Lustig and 300 former prisoners to remark the liberation of the camp in Auschwitz.

He said the most important thing is fighting hatred. "However, there is too much hatred in today's world. That's why I'm at Auschwitz -- to tell people to give up the hatred," he added.

The now retired professor from Zagreb was sent to Auschwitz by train and was separated from his parents when they arrived.

"This was the last moment we saw each other. I knew they were killed in a gas chamber in Auschwitz the same day we arrived," he said.

He survived working as an electrician in Auschwitz and other camps with his prisoner number "120598" on his left arm. He was imprisoned for two years till the liberation of the camps in January 1945.

"I told my story to kids for wishing my nightmare in 70 years ago should not happen to them again," Brown said.

The Auschwitz concentration camp was founded in 1940 and by 1942 became Europe's biggest centers of Jewish extermination, with more than 1.1 million people being killed.

The camp was liberated on Jan. 27, 1945 by Red Army soldiers of the former Soviet Union, the date which eventually became Holocaust Victims Memory Day. Endit