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Hundreds March in Krakow in Memory of Nazis' Jewish Victims

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Hundreds of people, including a handful of Holocaust survivors, marched Sunday in the Polish city of Krakow to mark the 65th anniversary of the Nazi liquidation of the city's Jewish ghetto.

The marchers included several Jews from Krakow whose lives were saved in 1943 by German industrialist Oskar Schindler.

The survivors were joined by family members, historians and Krakow residents, who set out to retrace the steps of Jews driven from the ghetto to the forced labor camp in nearby Plaszow.

The Plaszow camp was the setting for the acclaimed 1993 film Schindler's List, which chronicled the German businessman's efforts to shield more than a thousand Jews from Nazi death camps.

Schindler, an ethnic German from the former Czechoslovakia, had hundreds of Jews working in his factory. Many of the workers escaped death when Schindler used his wealth to feed them and to bribe Nazi SS troops to leave them alone. He also convinced Nazi officials that his factory and its workers were essential to the war effort, because much of the enamelware they produced was used by soldiers.

Historians say about 8,000 Jews and non-Jewish Poles died at Krakow. Schindler died in 1974 and is buried in Jerusalem.

Some information for this report was provided by AFP and AP.

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