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| - The annual March of the Living commemoration for Holocaust victims of the former Nazi German Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camps has been postponed due to worries over the new coronavirus, organisers said. Poland currently has 17 confirmed COVID-19 cases, and the government has rolled out a number of measures to stem the spread of the illness, including border checks and discouraging large gatherings. The March of the Living was due to take place in April and normally attracts thousands of people from dozens of countries every year. This is the first time it has been cancelled since it was first held in 1988. "It is with a heavy heart that we are forced to announce the postponement of this year's March of the Living in Poland," Shmuel Rosenman, the organisation's world chair, said in a statement Sunday. "Our primary concern is the health of the many participants and the Holocaust survivors who would be joining them," he added. Holocaust survivors, VIPs and young people pass through the gate at the entrance to the Auschwitz camp before marching more than three kilometres (two miles) to the Birkenau camp, the main extermination site. Between 1940 and early 1945, Nazi Germany exterminated about 1.1 million people at Auschwitz-Birkenau, including one million Jewish people from various European countries. Some 80,000 non-Jewish Poles, 25,000 Roma and 20,000 Soviet soldiers also died in the twin camps built by Nazi Germany in the town Oswiecim, in what was then occupied Poland. Meanwhile, Poland's Prime Minister Mateusz Morawiecki said Monday health checks would be introduced at four border crossings with Germany and one with the Czech Republic. Most cases of the coronavirus so far registered in Poland had come from people arriving from abroad, he said. In the Polish village of Jedrzychowice on the border with Germany, medical staff in white were setting up tents on Monday, according to AFP journalists. Travellers will have their temperature taken and their contact details will be gathered in case they need to be contacted. If anyone on a bus is thought to be a possible case, everyone on that coach will be taken by ambulance to hospitals. Morawiecki called on Poles to cancel any large gatherings planned and for anyone already in quarantine to observe the measures strictly. sw/jj/jv
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