A town of around 40,000 inhabitants in southern Poland, Oswiecim is best known as the place where the Nazis built the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp. Auschwitz has become a symbol of the Holocaust of six million European Jews, one million of whom died at the site between 1940 and 1945, along with more than 100,000 non-Jews. The windows of the mayor's house in Brzezinka (Birkenau in German), Oswiecim's neighbouring village, overlook the camp known as Auschwitz 2. "So many people died, and that's why you have to keep the memory of these people alive," says Andrzej Ryszka, adding, "that's what's most important, not the fact that people shouldn't live here." IMAGES AND SOUNDBITES ARRANGED IN SEQUENCES