When Teresa Regula arrived at Auschwitz as a 16-year-old, the first real pain she experienced was of her ears burning.
"They shaved us down to bare skin, and it was a scorching hot day, Aug. 4 ... That was the first authentic pain I felt," said the now 96-year-old Jewish survivor, speaking from her home in Krakow ahead of the 80th anniversary of Auschwitz's liberation by Soviet troops on Jan. 27.
Her memories illuminate the suffering by the estimated 1.3 million people sent to the Nazi death camp set up in occupied Poland as part of Adolf Hitler's "Final Solution" to annihilate European Jews. Most Auschwitz inmates perished there.
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