Thousands of youth remember Holocaust at Auschwitz

April 19, 2012: Members of Warsaws Jewish community, and city officials and others gather to mark the 69th anniversary of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in Warsaw, Poland. (AP2012)

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April 19, 2012: Members of Warsaws Jewish community, with city officials and others gather to mark the 69th anniversary of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in Warsaw, Poland. (AP2012)

April 19, 2012: Polands Chief Rabbi Michael Schudrich,center, prays in the heart of what was once the Warsaw Ghetto during a ceremony marking the 69th anniversary of the doomed Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, in Warsaw, Poland. (AP2012)

WARSAW, Poland – Thousands of youth from Israel, the United States and other countries marched Thursday between Auschwitz and Birkenau, the two parts of Nazi Germany's most notorious death complex, to honor the millions killed in the Holocaust.

Also Thursday, Polish officials and members of the Jewish community gathered in Warsaw to mark the 69th anniversary of the start of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the doomed revolt that a group of Jews waged against the Nazis in 1943.

An estimated 10,000 young people, some carrying Israeli flags or wearing them draped around their shoulders, took part in the March of the Living in Oswiecim, a town in southern Poland where the Germans operated Auschwitz during World War II.

The event, which takes place every year on Holocaust Remembrance Day, involves a walk of two miles from Auschwitz to Birkenau, where Hitler's men executed Jews, Roma and others in huge numbers in gas chambers.

The participants were joined by a handful of Holocaust survivors and American military veterans who helped liberate several other death camps at the end of World War II.