Ban Ki-moon visits Auschwitz

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STORY: U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon visited the site of World War II Nazi death camp Auschwitz on Monday to pay tribute to Holocaust victims on the first day of his visit to Poland for the UN climate conference COP 19.

Ban Ki-moon visited Auschwitz, the first of two camps set up in neighboring towns Oswiecim and Brzezinka. He walked under the inscription "Arbeit Macht Frei" (German: Work makes you free) above a gate which prisoners passed on their way to their barracks. Ha also saw exhibitions documenting the lives of the inmates and the conditions they suffered.

Some 1.5 million people, mostly Jews but also Roma, Poles and others, died in gas chambers or from starvation and disease in Auschwitz and the neighboring Birkenau death camp in Nazi occupied Poland between 1940 and 1945.

This was the first visit by Ban Ki-moon to Auschwitz; the last UN Secretary General to visit the former death camp was Boutros Boutros-Ghali in