A March of Remembrance has been held in Otwock near Warsaw to mark the 68th anniversary of the murder of the locality’s Jewish population. 

The participants marched from a railway siding to a memorial stone commemorating the Jews of Otwock, where Jewish and Christian prayers were held.

The Jewish Ghetto in Otwock was the second largest  in Nazi-occupied Warsaw district. On 19 August 1942 the Nazis deported from seven to ten thousand Jews to the Treblinka extermination camp. Six hundred of them were shot on the spot and another two thousand were killed in the next few days in the surrounding forests, where they sought shelter to avoid the deportations.

It was the ninth such March of Remembrance, which recalls the tragic plight of a half of the population of pre-war Otwock. Forty of its inhabitants are the recipients of the Righteous Among the Nations Awards of the Yad Vashem Institute in Jerusalem for helping Jews. One of them was the late Irena Sendler, who saved some 2, 500 Jewish children during the Holocaust. (mk)