A Holocaust museum was opened in Bavaria at the site of the Flossenbuerg concentration camp.
Holocaust survivors and Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko, whose father was a prisoner at Flossenbuerg for five months during World War II, attended the opening ceremony Sunday, held on the 62nd anniversary of the camp’s liberation.
“For me this concentration camp has a very human dimension,” Yushchenko said, according to The Associated Press.
He said he had a 1944 aerial photograph of Flossenbuerg showing the camp and its prisoners. “I know one of those people is my father,” Yushchenko said.
An estimated 30,000 prisoners died at Flossenbuerg, located in the southern German state of Bavaria, including Jews from Hungary and Poland, citizens of the Soviet Union and political prisoners from Germany. Eighty-four former prisoners attended Sunday’s ceremony, according to the AP.
After World War II, parts of the camp were dismantled, and a factory and private homes were built. Ex-prisoners began campaigning for a memorial in the mid-1990s. Several camp barracks eventually were restored and a research center opened.
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