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An undated archive photo shows Auschwitz II-Birkenau's main guard house which prisoners called 'the gate of death' and the railway with the remains of abandoned crockery. The railway, which was built in 1944, was the last stop for the trains bringing Jews to the death camp. (Reuters)

Jerzy Afanasjew's body tenses and his eyes close when he recalls the day he crawled out from the overcrowded cattle train as a 14-year-old boy to begin a six-month nightmare.

"What was Auschwitz? It was hell. Hell. A death factory," he says in a measured pace. "If you weren't gassed, you were exhausted to death, if you weren't exhausted to death, you starved, if you didn't starve, you died of disease."

Afanasjew is one of a dwindling group of people who, by chance or cunning, cheated death at Auschwitz, the biggest Nazi extermination camp during World War II that has become the symbol of the Holocaust.

On Jan. 27, hundreds of survivors and dozens of world leaders will commemorate the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation by the Soviet army and pay homage to the estimated 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, murdered there by the Nazis.

"Auschwitz is a place where we share the responsibility to remember the past with the goal of building a better society," said Abver Shalev, chairman of Israel's Yad Vashem Holocaust remembrance institute, who will attend the commemorations.

Set up in 1940 by occupying Nazi forces near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland as a labor camp for Poles, Auschwitz gradually became the centerpiece in Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler's "final solution" plan to exterminate Jews.

The scale of the industrialized killing at the camp, the cruelty of the guards and the pseudo-medical experiments conducted on prisoners by Nazi doctors have made Auschwitz synonymous with a coldly efficient genocide and total degradation of humanity.

Men, women and children -- mostly Jewish, but Gypsies, Russians and Poles too -- from Nazi-occupied Europe were taken to Auschwitz in overcrowded cattle trains. Many died of hunger and suffocation during the journey which usually lasted days.

Terrified, foul-smelling and starving, those who made the trip were often relieved at the prospect of fresh air and food. They did not know that the smoke from nearby chimneys was coming from crematoria burning the bodies of earlier arrivals.

Illusions were quickly dispelled as the guards separated those capable of hard work from the elderly and children who were sent straight to the gas chambers -- the process known in the camp as "selection."

Those who survived the "selection," not knowing what happened to family and friends, were stripped of their clothes, belongings and identity. A number was tatted on their arm and they were given a soup bowl and spoon.

Dressed in characteristic striped uniforms, the prisoners were then marched toward the labor camp under the gate adorned with giant inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (work sets one free) that came to symbolize the depth of Nazi cynicism.

Crammed in bare wooden or brick barracks, prisoners worked 12-hour days in construction and factories. Better jobs were found in the kitchens or offices.

After sleepless nights and long hours of backbreaking work, the prisoners were forced outside to attend roll-calls which lasted for hours. Those who died were piled up next to the standing to be counted.

Compounded by epidemics, the death rate of prisoners was 19-25 percent a month in 1942-43.

(Agencies)