French Holocaust survivor calls for religious tolerance

An 89-year-old French Holocaust survivor on Wednesday called for religious tolerance while accompanying youth on a visit to Nazi Germany’s notorious wartime Auschwitz death camp, now a museum in southern Poland.

Ginette Kolinka told the 150 French high-schoolers that she hoped their generation would have more luck in eradicating the horrors of war.

“Maybe you’ll make a difference and say: ‘let’s not speak ill of Jews, let’s not speak ill of Arabs, let’s not speak ill of Muslims,” the former Auschwitz inmate said.

“We have to remember we’re all human, each with our own strengths and flaws.”

She spoke a week after deadly Islamist attacks on a kosher supermarket and the Paris office of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo left 17 people dead and France reeling.

One student, Estelle, was moved to tears by the visit: “They told us all about the gas chambers. I found it shocking.”

“I’d heard about it all already, but to see the site in person and really understand was overwhelming.”

About 1.1 million people from around Europe — around one million of whom were Jews — died at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp between 1940 and 1945.