Schwarzenegger visited the Auschwitz-Birkenau complex in southern Poland and the Jewish Museum in nearby Oświęcim on Wednesday.
The Hollywood star and former governor of California was accompanied by Auschwitz Jewish Center Foundation Chairman Simon Bergson, who highlighted how prejudice can be wiped out in the space of a generation.
“Let’s fight prejudice together and let’s just terminate it once and for all,” Schwarzenegger said.
He placed candles at the “Death Wall,” and at a monument to victims of the nearby Birkenau site, vowing to fight hatred and discrimination and keep memory alive of what happened at the concentration camp between 1940 and 1945.
At the Synagogue in Oświęcim, Schwarzenegger met Holocaust survivor Lidia Maksymowicz, who was an inmate at Auschwitz-Birkenau as a three-year-old.
The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex operated in German-occupied southern Poland between May 1940 and January 1945. It was the largest among the Nazi German concentration and death camps during World War II.
More than 1.1 million people, mostly European Jews, as well as Poles, Roma, Soviet POWs and people of many other nationalities, perished there before the camp was liberated on January 27, 1945.
Radio Poland’s Agnieszka Bielawska has this report.
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