Public domain photo The train tracks into the Auschwitz II-Birkenau Camp, the largest of the camps that made up Auschwitz and the camp where the vast majority of the killing took place.

About 1.3 million people were deported to the complex actually made up of several different camps between 1940 and 1945.

Approximately 1.1 million were murdered. Nearly one million of that total were Jews with Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners and other groups among the people persecuted there.

The infamous Holocaust tattoos on the arms of victims were only given at Auschwitz.

Nearly 4,400 miles separate Warren from that notorious place and the term appears in newspapers in Warren about 40 times between World War II and 1980.

Public domain photo Josef Kramer, the Beast of Belsen, and Irma Grese, two of the most notorious Nazi concentration camp guards, pictured together after the war. Both were arrested, tried, convicted and executed for their involvement in the Holocaust.

Early on, those are accounts from the scene and the prosecution of the people that perpetrated those crimes.

But as the years pass, those references show up in TV guides, on the comic page, in editorial column and editorial cartoons.

The first reference can be found on April 11, 1945 in the bottom right hand corner of the front page of the Warren Times Mirror.

The headline: “5,000,000 Jews Gassed and Cremated in Murder Factory.”

While the 5 million total at Auschwitz is wildly inflated, it isn’t that far off from the total number of Jews killed during the Holocaust. It’s important to remember here just how confused the situation must have been on the ground. The conquering Soviet troops weren’t equipped to handle the humanitarian crisis and, in spite of the discovery of the camp, the war was still ongoing.

For a (relatively) contemporary example, remember the death estimates from Sept. 11. On the day and in the days following estimates ran into the 10s of thousands.

The report on April 11 cites an interview with Dr. Bela Fabian, a Hungarian political official who “said in an interview today that 5,000,000 Jews had been gassed and cremated at a murder factory at Auschwitz, in upper Silesia.

“Fabian said he was taken to Auschwitz 10 months ago with 5,000,000 other Hungarian Jews and that 400,000 were gassed and cremated in the first two months and that only 1,000 remained alive.”

“With Lt. Theodore Gutman, of Los Angeles, and Sgt. Siegmund Fuld, New York City, acting as translators, Fabian told a story so horrible as to be almost unbelievable,” the account continued. “Fabian said he could speak English but that he was so unnerved by the ordeal of his detention that he preferred to give the interview in German.”

Accounts also appear in the Times Mirror that day of “thousands of men and women forced to toil for the Nazis” turning on them, “pillaging warehouses, trains and quartermaster depots.”

The next references to the most notorious Nazi killing center appear in August.

“The Exchange Telegraph Agency said in a Vienna dispatch today that Austrian police had arrested Ernst Grabner, former commander of the Nazi prison camp at Oswiecim (Auschwitz) in upper Silesia,” an account said on Aug. 7. ” Grabner, personally charged with killing 2,000 persons, will be tried by an Austrian people’s court.”

Grabner was the chief of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police. His main role was combating camp resistance but multiple sources point to him as the emperor of the camp’s torture chamber, Block 11, where Zyklon B gas was first tested.

He was hanged in 1948 after a trial where he was convicted on charges of murder and crimes against humanity.

The next month, additional perpetrators went on trail.

That included Josef Kramer, who was at Auschwitz before gaining notorious as the “Beast of Belsen” by images at that camp.

He, along with 47 others, were tried by British military court, according to a Sept. 17, 1945 wire report in the Times Mirror.

He was “the most widely publicized defendant but the spotlight also was focused on blond 21-year-old Irma Greese who served for three years as a guard at the ill-famed women’s camp at Ravensbruck, north of Berlin, and Auschwitz in Poland before going to Belsen.

“The prosecution announced Hughes (medical officer) would be the first of a parade of witnesses who would give evidence that Kramer and his 44 aides were guilty of inhuman and unbelievably cruel practices at Belsen, and that Kramer and 11 of the 44 were guilty of equal if not greater crimes of extermination at the concentration camp at Auschwitz.”

Savage among savages is Grese. Her case really prompts the question of “what can possibly push someone to act like this?”

Information from the Jewish Virtual Library explains that she was born into an agricultural family and quit school at 15 before working on a farm, a shop and then a hospital. She became a camp guard at the age of 19.

“After the war, survivors provided extensive details of murders, tortures, cruelties and sexual excesses engaged in by Irma Grese during her years at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen. They testified to her acts of pure sadism, beatings and arbitrary shooting of prisoners, savaging of prisoners by her trained and half starved dogs, to her selecting prisoners for the gas chambers. She habitually wore heavy boots and carried a whip and a pistol. She used both physical and emotional methods to torture the camp’s inmates and enjoyed shooting prisoners in cold blood. She beat some of the women to death and whipped others mercilessly using a plaited whip. The skins of three inmates that she had made into lamp shades were found in her hut.”

Nicknamed the “Hyena of Auschwitz” by inmates, she was convicted and executed before the end of 1945.

Amid the horrors of Auschwitz, there are incredible, almost unbelievable, stories that show the courage and resilience of the human spirit.

One of those appears in the Oct. 18, 1971 Times Mirror – “Polish Priest Beatified.”

A Polish priest became Sunday the first victim of a Nazi concentration camp to be pronounced “blessed” – a step preliminary to sainthood – by the Roman Catholic Church. The solemn and moving ceremony in St. Peter’s Basilica was attended by the man for whom the martyred priest had given up his life 30 years ago.

Pope Paul VI pronounced the formula of beatification for the Rev. Maximilian Mary Kolbe and called him “perhaps the brightest and most glittering figure to emerge from the darkness and degradation of the Nazi epoch.”

Near the foot of the window stood Frenciszek Gajowniczek, one of an estimated 1,500 to 2,000 pilgrims who had journeyed here from Poland for the ceremonies.

In July 1941, Gajowniczek and nine fellow prisoners in the German concentration camp at Auschwitz were selected by guards to die in retaliation for the successful escape of another prisoner.

When Gajowniczek, a sergeant in the Polish Army, cried out that he would never see his wife and children again, Father Kolbe, a prisoner in the same block, broke out of line and offered himself in the soldier’s place. The priest was killed by the Germans with an injection of carbolic acid on Aug. 14, 1941.

A local Seventh-day Adventist pastor, Rev. Hampton Walker invoked the words of infamous writer Elie Wiesel in presenting a question that many surely must have asked in a Times Observer column in 1977 entitled “Where is God?”

“Elie Wiesel, who was interned at the concentration camp at Auschwitz, tells the account of an execution of two men and a young boy which he witnessed. In his own words he relates: ‘The three victims mounted together onto the chairs. The three necks were placed at the same moment with the nooses. ‘Long live freedom,’ cried the two adults. But the child was silent. ‘Where is God? Where is He?’ someone behind me asked.’ This question what Elie Wiesel heard asked… has been on the lips of many a man through history….”