Liberation was not the end of the dying.

The SS had three reasons. It did not want prisoners left behind to tell the liberators what had happened. It thought it needed them to keep armament production going. And some SS leaders, Himmler among them, believed they could use Jewish prisoners as hostages to bargain for a separate peace in the west. The Holocaust Encyclopedia calls that belief irrational.

The evacuation of Auschwitz began on January 17, 1945. Tens of thousands of prisoners, most of them Jews, were marched 55 kilometers (about 30 miles) to Gliwice or 63 kilometers (about 35 miles) to Wodzisław Śląski in the middle of a Polish winter, and from there most were put on unheated freight trains to camps in Germany. Guards shot anyone who fell behind or could not go on.

The largest marches set out from Auschwitz and Stutthof. In the winter the columns went west to Buchenwald, Flossenbürg, Dachau and Sachsenhausen, and in the spring the SS moved prisoners again, from Buchenwald and Flossenbürg to Dachau and Mauthausen. The camps inside Germany filled with prisoners from the east.

As the evacuations came to depend on marches and open rail cars, the number who died of exhaustion and exposure along the routes rose dramatically. Yad Vashem puts the dead of the marches, from the summer of 1944 to the end of the war, at between 200,000 and 250,000 prisoners. Between a quarter and a third of them were Jews.

Soviet troops entered Auschwitz on January 27, 1945. In the weeks before, the SS had forced most of the prisoners to march west, and the soldiers found over 6,000 emaciated prisoners alive. The retreating Germans had destroyed most of the warehouses, and what they had not managed to destroy was still there: hundreds of thousands of men's suits, more than 800,000 women's garments, and more than 14,000 pounds of human hair.

American forces reached Buchenwald on April 11, 1945, and encountered more than 20,000 prisoners. Earlier that same day an underground prisoner resistance organization had seized control of the camp to stop the retreating guards from committing atrocities. That April American troops also liberated Dachau, Dora-Mittelbau and Flossenbürg, and in early May, Mauthausen. In northern Germany British forces liberated Bergen-Belsen and reached Neuengamme, and Soviet forces reached Sachsenhausen, Ravensbrück and Stutthof.

Dov Landau was one of some 300 boys in Buchenwald. After the liberation he looked after an older boy, Tulek, sick with typhus in the hospital outside the camp, and Tulek asked him to bring his little brother, Lolek, to the window. They were the Lau brothers: Yad Vashem captions a photograph of the two in Buchenwald after liberation "Lolek and Naftali."

Germany surrendered unconditionally on May 7, 1945, in the west and on May 9 in the east.

British forces liberated the camp on April 15, 1945, and found around 55,000 prisoners, many of them seriously ill with typhus. About 37,000 people had died there since May 1943. More than 13,000 of those found alive died in the three months that followed, of malnutrition or disease, too ill to recover. When the survivors had been moved out, the British burned the whole camp down to stop the typhus spreading.

In all, about 50,000 people died in the Bergen-Belsen camp complex, most of them Jews. Anne Frank and her sister Margot were among them; they died there in February or March 1945, weeks before the British came.

Petchka Mandelker was marched from Auschwitz to Bergen-Belsen in the winter and liberated there by the British. Years later an interviewer asked her whether liberation had felt like techiyas hameisim, the resurrection of the dead.

Many moved west instead, to territories the Allies had liberated, and waited in camps for somewhere to go. After Kielce, 150,000 Polish Jews who had survived the war in the Soviet Union fled eastern Europe as well.

In the first months many still wore their camp uniforms and were housed beside non-Jews, sometimes even beside Nazi collaborators. In June 1945 the United States government sent Earl Harrison to see how the survivors were living. He visited 30 camps in Germany and Austria. Many of the Jewish survivors he found were under armed guard behind barbed wire, some in the very camps where they had been prisoners, in crowded and unsanitary quarters, while the German population around them lived far better. He summed it up for President Truman in one sentence.

Harrison delivered the report to Truman on August 24, 1945, and General Dwight D. Eisenhower, who commanded the American forces in Europe, moved within weeks. He ordered camps for Jewish survivors alone, raised their ration from 2,200 calories a day to 2,500 on September 20, and had the barbed wire taken down.

The survivors did not wait to be organized. Three days after the liberation of Bergen-Belsen they elected Josef Rosensaft to head the first Jewish committee in a displaced persons camp. They were known as the Sh'erit ha-Pletah, the Surviving Remnant. In mid-1945 the American officer in charge of the Landsberg camp, Irving Heymont, wrote to his wife that the people of his camp appeared demoralized beyond hope of rehabilitation. Within months its 5,000 survivors had built one of the most flourishing communities of the Surviving Remnant.

In early 1946 the Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry visited Landsberg and found no children there between the ages of one and five. Within 15 months of Foehrenwald's opening, about 200 women there were pregnant at the same time. There were many weddings in the camps, and many births.

Orthodox life came back with them. Foehrenwald was a center of Orthodoxy, and its yeshiva, a religious academy, had 150 students and was the administrative headquarters for all the yeshivos in the American zone. Landsberg had a Talmud Torah, a religious elementary school, and a Klausenburger yeshiva; it had a mikvah, the Jewish ritual bath, a kosher kitchen and a society for keeping Shabbos, the Sabbath, and early in 1946, 2,643 Orthodox Jews there registered for kosher beef. Feldafing's religious community founded a Talmud Torah, a yeshiva and the seminaries Bet Medrash Lita and Bet Medrash Ungarn, and the camp had a rabbinical council of its own. Yeshivos opened at Bergen-Belsen too, and the Jewish holidays became the great gatherings of the year.

The Klausenburger Rebbe, Rabbi Yekutiel Yehuda Halberstam, had lost his wife and eleven children. After the war he became a leader of the Orthodox survivors, worked to revive Jewish life in the camps, and founded yeshivos and seminaries. On Yom Kippur 1945, at Foehrenwald, he went through the opening words of the confession, Ashamnu, we have sinned, Bagadnu, we have been unfaithful, and asked whether those sins could be theirs.

Then, in Yad Vashem's account, he named sins the prayer book does not list: the times they had begged God to take their souls. He asked them to pray for their faith to be restored.

After two months in a hospital with typhus, Shmuel Bella went to Feldafing and then to Foehrenwald. The boys in his room were Hungarian and had been away from home for less than a year. He had been away for almost six.

Most, Harrison had noted, wished to go to Palestine, the Land of Israel. The Anglo-American Committee of Inquiry proposed admitting 100,000 of them, and Britain, which ruled Palestine, rejected its report. From 1945 to 1948 the Brihah, Hebrew for escape, moved more than 100,000 Jews past British patrols and into Palestine illegally. The British captured many of the ships and held the passengers in camps on Cyprus.

Mrs. Gluck, from Sighet, married after the war, and in 1947 she and her husband sailed for the Land of Israel with the Haganah, the Jewish underground. Their ship was a different one, and it was stopped too.

In the end over 80,000 Jewish displaced persons reached the United States, about 136,000 settled in Israel, and another 20,000 went to Canada, South Africa and elsewhere. The American door opened slowly: the Displaced Persons Act of 1948 was unfavorable at first to Jewish survivors and was amended in 1950. Almost all the camps had closed by 1952. Foehrenwald, the last of them, ran until 1957, twelve years after the war ended, as a home for Jews who had nowhere else to go.

The war ends in the middle of this list, not at the end of it.

The map is drawn from the records of the Project Witness camps directory; the table under it gives the source for every camp. The page shows no photographs of the dead. Where it shows the evidence of the killing, it is a filled-in mass grave and its marker.

Except for the Klausenburger Rebbe, whose words are Yad Vashem's translation, the survivors quoted on this page speak in Project Witness's own recorded testimonies. Each passage was checked against the audio of the recording, and the link under it says where in the testimony it begins.