Friday marks the 78th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp by the Soviet Red Army; more than 200 soldiers gave their lives in the battle to free people from one of the most atrocious sites of mass extermination in human history.
About 1.1 million prisoners - most of them Jews, as well as Soviet and Polish prisoners of war, were killed there between 1940 and 1945 by the Nazi regime which occupied Poland at the time.