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Yisrael Abelesz was just 14 years old when he was deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau, the most infamous of all Nazi camps. Whilst there he escaped selection for the gas chambers and survived typhoid and a death march.

To commemorate the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, footballing legends from five Premier League clubs have met Holocaust survivors to honour their resilience and shine a light on the enduring consequences of unchecked hate.

By the age of 30, Peter Lantos had endured the horrors of Bergen-Belsen concentration camp, lost most of his family, suffered abuse at the hands of Hungary’s Communist police, earned a medical degree and defected to England.

Born in 1927, Otto Rosenberg grew up in Berlin with his grandmother and two siblings. His family were Sinti, a Romani population of central Europe. Otto remembers living on private rented ‘lots’ of land that his family shared with the caravans and houses of extended family and other members of the Sinti community.

Johann ‘Rukeli’ Trollmann was born on 27 December 1907 near Hannover. He was a popular German Sinto boxer, who was discriminated against, marginalised, sterilised, and finally deported to a concentration camp, where he was murdered. Here, Rainer Schulze, Professor of Modern European History at the University of Essex, shares his story.