Survivors of the Holocaust gathered at one of the scenes of the Nazis' gravest crimes today,

the extermination camp at Auschwitz-Burkenau in Poland, on this 80th anniversary of its liberation.

Of the more than 6 million Jews murdered by the Nazis, 1.1 million were killed at Auschwitz,

and among them nearly a quarter million were children.

Many of the survivors there today were just children when they were marched through the camp

on little feet wearing little shoes. Now, a project to preserve those shoes is renewing attention

on the war's smallest victims. Here's special correspondent Malcolm Brabant.

Behind guard towers and disconnected electrified barbed wire fences dedicated restorers are working with

great tenderness in a place synonymous with unspeakable cruelty. Time is our main

enemy here. Historian Martin Noras has been working for two years, preserving shoes belonging to the

extermination camp's youngest victims.

The leather itself is pretty resilient when it comes to the passage of time.

Metal, however, is our main issue.

Metal starts corroding.

That corrosion triggers degradation processes and everything else.

Although Auschwitz was turned into a museum, a year after being liberated by the Soviet

Red Army in January 1945, it remains a crime scene.

Basically, we are dealing with evidence of a crime. This is the philosophy adopted by the museum

that this is evidence of a crime, one of the largest crimes in world's history.

The Conservators are working on 8,000 children's shoes, a fraction of the 120,000 in the Auschwitz collection.

Preserving these objects, this evidence is about preserving the memory of the victims of the crime,

preserving their identity often.

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