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Entry to Auschwitz - Source: ONE News -
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The former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz must be preserved so future generations can learn lessons from the horrors of the Holocaust, British Prime Minister Gordon Brown said.
Polish Prime Minister Donald Tusk recently appealed for international donations to preserve the facilities and exhibits at Auschwitz, now a museum comprising 155 camp buildings and 300 ruined facilities.
"We will support the Polish prime minister's determination that this remain an international memorial to what has gone wrong and what we need to warn against," Brown told reporters after visiting the gas chambers and other sites where up to 1.5 million people, mostly Jews, are estimated to have died.
Tusk has said the Auschwitz-Birkenau museum, located near the town of Oswiecim in southern Poland, will set up a foundation to administer a special fund with a minimum capital of 120 million euros.
British officials travelling with Brown said the government had not yet decided how much money to contribute to the project.
On a visit to the largest of Adolf Hitler's death camps, Brown said his government would create national awards to honour Britons who helped victims of the Nazis. This would help educate "a new generation into the wrongs of what happened here".
In a message in the visitors' book, Brown wrote: "In this place of desolation, I reaffirm my belief that we all have a duty, each and every one of us, not to stand by but to stand up against discrimination and prejudice."
Brown, accompanied by his wife Sarah, placed a candle at the 'death wall', where many political prisoners were executed, and walked along the railway track which transported hundreds of thousands of Jews to their deaths.
Message in a bottle
Separately, a Polish official said workers had discovered a bottle hidden in the wall of a building next to the Auschwitz site containing a scrap of paper on which prisoners who worked there had scrawled their names.
Monika Bartosz, spokeswoman for a vocational school now occupying the building, said the bottle had been found during refurbishment work at the site, used as a warehouse by the Nazi SS during World War Two.
On the crumpled scrap were written the names of seven Polish prisoners and one Frenchman, their camp numbers and cities of origin. All were aged 18 to 20 at the time, the note said.
"These buildings did not belong to the territory of the Auschwitz camp but in 1944 the prisoners were used to build a bomb shelter in the cellar of one of the SS warehouses. And that's where the bottle was found," said Bartosz.
The school plans to hand the scrap of paper, probably torn from a cement bag, to the museum at a ceremony soon, Bartosz said. She hoped relatives of those named could attend.
"This would be a beautiful end to this story," she said.
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