Letter: Churchill fully understood the horrors of Nazi dictatorship

Sir: The recent attention of the media to Auschwitz in particular and the Holocaust in general has been deeply moving to those of us who survived.

Your article "The shadow of Auschwitz" (27 January) refers to the death camps in eastern Poland and states that they were dismantled at the end of 1943. This is not the case with Majdanek, which was the last death camp to be created by the Nazis and which, when taken by the Russians, remained intact.

Majdanek is in Lublin and has been preserved by the Polish authorities with great dignity. The wooden barracks are there, the gas chambers and the crematoria are there and even the stone slab for medical experiments is still there adjoining the commandant's quarters. The area of land upon which the camp was erected remained three-quarters unbuilt pending the expansion of the extermination programme. This can all be seen today very clearly in all its horror.

I survived the Holocaust and came to England in 1949 from Poland and share with all those who have escaped tyranny the privilege of living in a free and democratic society.

HANNAH LEWIS

London N6