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Oldest Nazi concentration camp survivor dies

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Press Trust of India London

Antoni Dobrowolski, a teacher by profession, was imprisoned for giving secret lessons during Germany's occupation of Poland.

Dobrowolski was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to the Nazi concentration camp in 1942, the 'BBC news' reported.

He was later transferred to the Gross Rosen and Sachsenhausen camps in Germany, before being freed in 1945.

"Auschwitz was worse than Dante's hell," the BBC quoted him as saying in a video made when he was 103.

Education for Poles was restricted to just four years during the Nazi occupation, in an effort to suppress Polish culture.

Dobrowolski was part of an underground effort to continue education for children.

 

Approximately one million people were reportedly killed by the Nazis at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

After invading Poland in 1939, sparking World War II, the Germans banned anything beyond four years of elementary education in a bid to crush Polish culture and the country's intelligentsia.

Dobrowolski was later moved to the concentration camps of Gross-Rosen and then Sachsenhausen, where he was liberated by the Soviet Army in the spring of 1945 as the war ended.

Auschwitz was reportedly the largest Nazi concentration camp, where more than 1 million people died.

  

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First Published: Oct 23 2012 | 3:05 PM IST

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