Genocides are unfortunately an indelible part of human history. They happened before WW II, and after as well. But there was nevertheless something deeply shocking about the systematic way it was performed at concentrations camps, chief among them Auschwitz, in Poland. Its prisoners were routinely subjected to hard labor, starved, experimented on and gassed en masse. The amount of hardship and misery they experienced cannot be understated. The full extent of the horrors was not known until the Red Army took the camp and began exploring.

On this day, January 27, in 1945 Soviet forces entered the camp, mostly unopposed. The German soldiers who ran the camp fled before the approaching army, taking some 60,000 prisoners with them in a forced march westward into Germany. Thousands of others were hastily killed in the previous days. The ones left behind were mostly weak, sick and dying.

Today Auschwitz is considered a World Heritage Site, and its grounds and structures, still mostly intact, serve as a living holocaust museum. Since 2005, January 27 is marked in Europe and the United States as International Holocaust Memorial Day.