death camp

At the same time, the concentration camp is a modern global phenomenon with its own ironic history, which long precedes the Nazi death camps.

Other camps further east, like the death camps of Treblinka, Sobibor and Auschwitz, had either been destroyed by the Germans to hide their crimes in the face of Soviet advances or emptied of their inmates.

Ernest Salomon of Santa Barbara, almost 90, said he and some of his immediate family escaped German death camps while other relatives perished.

This was one of six death camps they built in occupied Poland in 1942, and it was by far the biggest.

"Treblinka-2 was a death camp where a large number of people were killed in gas chambers," she says, without specifying that most of the victims had been Jews.