"I realised that they were prisoners and not workers so I called out, "You are free, come out!""
This is a quotation from Vasily Gromadsky, one of the Russian officers who liberated the Nazi extermination camp Auschwitz in 1945.
Today is the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the biggest of six Nazi death camps, where up to 1.5 million of the many millions of victims of the Nazis died as part of the "final solution" to exterminate the Jewish race.
Mr Gromadsky's story is told on the American Public Broadcasting site, which carries good material on the liberation and is one of many excellent Holocaust history resources on the internet.
The anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz has been chosen as an appropriate day for Holocaust Memorial Day, which is being commemorated around the world. Ceremonies are being held at Auschwitz, Krakow and Westminster Abbey.
It is the fourth year in which an organised Holocaust Memorial Day has been held in the UK, following the establishment of the Taskforce of International Co-operation on Holocaust Education, Remembrance and Research in 1998.
Among the many Holocaust websites are some focusing on survivors, such as the Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation. Archived photographs and timelines can also be found.
Many of the best sites are those run by Holocaust museums. The excellent US Holocaust Memorial Museum website includes detailed histories and archive photography and an interactive section of survivors' stories. Among them is the story of Lola Rein, who was born in Poland, and whose mother arranged for a Ukrainian woman to help her by hiding her in a hole in her barn for months.
There is also a good site for Daniel Libeskind's Jewish Museum in Berlin. The city has been building a Holocaust memorial, which will be inaugurated later this year.
In the UK, a Holocaust exhibition is taking place at the Imperial War Museum in London. And in 1995, Beth Shalom [House of Peace], Britain's first dedicated Holocaust Memorial and education centre, was opened on the edge of Sherwood Forest, Nottinghamshire.
The UK Holocaust Memorial Day website carries essays from historians. Each year, the memorial day has a theme, which this year is Survivors and Liberation. In this year's essay (pdf), Professor David Cesarani, of the University of London, says the testimonies of survivors are crucial to the prevention of further genocide.
If we had heeded them [the survivors] earlier, perhaps the catastrophes in Bosnia, Rwanda and Kosovo would not have occurred ... Sadly, the stories told by the survivors of Nazi terror have resonated in the horrific stories that emerged from Srebrenica and Kigali.
