KRAKOW, Poland (AP) — England coach Roy Hodgson led members of his European Championship squad on a solemn visit to the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camps on Friday.
Hodgson and Football Association chairman David Bernstein lit candles where prisoners got off trains at the most notorious death camp Nazi Germany operated on Polish soil after invading its neighbor during World War II.
The England delegation was accompanied by the Jewish former Chelsea manager Avram Grant, whose family members were among the estimated 1.1 to 1.5 million people to die in Auschwitz, either in gas chambers, from being shot or from starvation and disease.
Most of the Auschwitz victims were Jews, but the Nazis also killed many Poles, Soviet prisoners of wars, Gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents there.
