Researching the horrors of Auschwitz set this photographer on a hunt for his lost family history. Philip Key reports
Largest Nazi concentration camp
* AUSCHWITZ, in Poland, was the largest of the Nazi concentration camps and was made up of three main camps with Auschwitz I the administrative centre, Auschwitz II (Birkenau) the extermination camp, and Auschwitz III (Monowitz) the work camp.
* THE first prisoners (Polish political prisoners) arrived at the camp on June 14, 1940.
* THERE is no exact figure for the number of people killed in the camp. The latest calculations place it at between 1.1 and 1.6m.
* OVER 90% of the people killed there were Jewish.
* IN ADDITION to Jews, gipsies, Soviet prisoners of war and prisoners of all nationalities died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz.
* TOWARDS the end of the war the SS tried to cover up their actions at Auschwitz, by dismantling the gas chambers and evacuating as many prisoners as possible deep into Germany. Those left behind were liberated by Red Army soldiers on January 27, 1945.
* BACK in 1947, the Polish Parliament established the Auschwitz-Birkenau State Museum on the grounds of Auschwitz I and Auschwitz II, and the site was added to Unesco's World Heritage List in 1979.
