Survivors of the most infamous Nazi death camp, Auschwitz, on Friday marked the 61th anniversary of its liberation and looked to a May visit there by German-born Pope Benedict as a sign of healing.
"No one can pass indifferently by the tragedy of the Shoah. This crime has stained all humankind, for all time," said Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz, using the Hebrew word for the Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jews.
More than 1.5 million people died at Auschwitz-Birkenau, set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland as its most efficient killing machine in the "Final Solution", the genocide of European Jews.
More than one million Jews were killed there, along with Gypsies, Poles and Russians.
At the sombre ceremony, Marcinkiewicz warned that hatred and anti-Semitism were still dangers.
"And still today the world must defend itself against people obsessed with hatred," he said.
The commemoration was held a day after Poland's President, Lech Kaczynski, met the Pope and then confirmed that Benedict would stop at Auschwitz during his visit to Poland in May.
"The visit of a German Pope brings a certain closure -- when I was here in the camp, I thought that there was no God. And now the German Pope is coming here," said Denis Karagiorga, a Greek Jew, more than 80 years old.
But no-one underestimated the significance the Pope's visit could have.
"It's very difficult for me to talk about the visit of Pope Benedict to Auschwitz, because during the war my whole family died at the hands of the Germans -- only my brother was left," said former prisoner Wladyslaw Szepelak, more than 70 years old.
"But perhaps there are times when it's better to forget, to think about the future and not to live in what happened 60 years ago," he added.
MODEST CEREMONY
The ceremony was a modest one compared with last year's commemoration, which drew heads of state from around the world.
Visitors including many young people placed candles and red roses at the main monument, amid camp ground covered with half a metre (yard) of snow.
Prayers and selections from prisoners' letters were read out in German and Polish and youth were introduced to survivors to hear their stories.
One Auschwitz survivor, Halina Birenbaum, lost her parents in other Nazi death camps and has been asking herself ever since why she survived and they did not.
"If I were to die in Treblinka, I would be together with my father, if in Majdanek, I would be with my mother. If here, I would be with my brother and his wife. But I lived, and I would like everyone to remember all these places," she said.
The late John Paul, who died last April, visited Auschwitz as part of his first trip home as Pope in 1979.
Benedict has pledged to continue his predecessor's work towards Catholic-Jewish reconciliation.
During his visit to Germany last August, Benedict visited a synagogue that had been destroyed by the Nazi's before the start of World War Two.
Benedict served briefly in the Hitler Youth during the war when membership of the Nazi paramilitary organisation was compulsory. But he was never a member of the Nazi party and his family opposed Hitler's rule.
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