World youth repair Auschwitz-area Jewish cemetery

More than 300 young people from around the world today joined to repair a vandalized 18th century Jewish cemetery near the former Auschwitz death camp.
"We wanted to encourage the youths to express opposition to such behavior and show that decent people are in the majority," said Tomasz Kuncewicz of the Auschwitz Jewish Center, which organized the event.
About 100 came from schools in and around the city of Oswiecim, 320 kilometers south of Warsaw. The group included 22 nationalities.

The historic cemetery - the last in Oswiecim, which before World War II had a large Jewish population - was damaged in an attack in early May.
Among the overturned tombstones was that of Oswiecim's last Jewish resident, who died last year. The volunteers today put 25 tombstones back in their place, leaving four badly damaged stones to be professionally repaired.
It remains unclear who was responsible for the attack. A number of similar attacks on the cemetery have taken place in the recent years.

The graveyard was set up by the Jewish community at the end of the 18th century and held some 1,700 graves before Nazi Germany invaded Poland in 1939. Many were destroyed by the Nazis who used Jewish tombstones in construction.
More than 1 million people, most of them Jews, died in the gas chambers or from disease and starvation at the death camp Auschwitz - the German name for Oswiecim - between 1940 and 1945.

Poland had Europe's largest prewar Jewish community, with 3.5 million people, or 10 percent of the country's population. About 3 million Polish Jews died in Nazi death camps, and many survivors left in the 1950s and 1960s because of communist-sponsored anti-Semitic propaganda. About 20,000 Jews live in Poland now.