India’s President Pratibha Patil visited the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp on Sunday where more than one million people, mostly European Jews, perished during World War II.

“In a place like this words fail,” wrote Patil on the final day of her visit to Poland, in a memorial book at the former camp, now a museum in Oswiecim, west of the city of Krakow in southern Poland.

“My heart bows in prayer for the peace of the souls of countless men and women, old and young alike and the children who were tortured with hard labour and then gassed to death at these camps,” she added.

“May this be a chilling reminder that such crimes of genocide shall never go unpunished.” 
India’s head of state also visited the “wall of death” at Auschwitz — where prisoners were brought to be shot — and the crematoria where the bodies of those gassed in its infamous gas chambers were burned.

(Source: EJP / AFP)