KALININGRAD, January 27. /TASS/. A March of the Living was held in Russia’s westernmost Kaliningrad region on Sunday to remember the victims of the death march of 1945 when the Nazi massacred about 7,000 Jews at the Baltic Sea beach, Alexei Zalivatsky, head of administration of the settlement of Yantarny, the venue of the remembrance event, told TASS.
"About 80 people took part in the March of the Living who marched down 12 kilometers following the route inmates of East Prussia concentration camps were forced to walk from Konigsberg (now Kaliningrad) to Palmnicken (now Yantarny). Some 350 people took part in a remembrance rally ceremony was held at the monument to the victims of the 1945 massacre. Among participants were the region’s governor Anton Alikhanov, German, Lithuanian and Polish consuls, public activists," he said, adding that the March of the Living has been held for six years on January 27, International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
As the Red Army was approaching in January 1945, some 7,000 inmates of East Prussian concentration camps, mostly Jewish women and children, were forced to march to Konigsberg. But as the city was already besieged by the Red Army, they were directed to Palmnicken. By the time they reached it, there were about 3,000 of them. Overnight from January 31 to February 1, 1945, these people were taken to a Palmnicken beach to be forced into the ice-covered water and be mowed down by machinegun fire. Only thirteen people survived the massacre.
The monument to the victims of the 1945 Konigsberg death march was unveiled at the site of the tragedy in Yantarny six years ago. The ten-meter tall marble monument features human hands with prisoners’ ID numbers raised in prayer for help.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day is marked on January 27 under a United Nations resolution to commemorate the tragedy of Holocaust during World War II. On this day in 1945, Auschwitz-Birkenau, the largest Nazi concentration and death camp located in Poland, was liberated by the Red Army. More than 1.1 million people, of whom some one million were Jews, were massacred in this death camp alone. In all, according to historians, the overall number of Holocaust victims exceeds six million.