World leaders and survivors have stopped to remember the horror of the Holocaust at a snow-swept ceremony in Auschwitz-Birkenau on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.
Surrounded by barbed wire fences and remnants of the killing machine used to gas and incinerate some of the 11 million people who died in the Holocaust, the leaders arriving for the ceremony on Thursday vowed that the World War Two atrocity should never be forgotten.
Up to 1.5 million people died in the gas chambers and crematoria of Auschwitz-Birkenau, set up by Nazi Germany in occupied Poland during World War Two as the main centre of their "Final Solution", the genocide of 6 million European Jews.
Auschwitz was liberated on January 27, 1945, by the advancing Soviet army whose stunned soldiers released 7,000 emaciated prisoners left behind as the Germans withdrew.
"The snow was falling like today, we were dressed in stripes and some of us had bare feet," Polish survivor Kazimierz Orlowski, 84, said on Thursday. "These were horrible times."
Elderly survivors, many accompanied by younger relatives, walked slowly past the rusting wire fences under a dark grey sky and heavily falling snow towards a monument to the victims.
"I am not here to talk about what happened. My only aim is to light a candle for my mother, whose ashes are who knows where in this camp," said Jan Wojciech Topolewski, a former prisoner whose mother died in Auschwitz.
For four years the camp was the centrepiece of Nazi Germany's "Final Solution". The site has become the most powerful symbol of the Holocaust and the reminder of one of the darkest chapters in Europe's history.
"I want to say to all people around the world -- this should not happen again," said Anatoly Shapiro, the commander of the troops who first entered Auschwitz.
"I saw the faces of the people we liberated -- they went through hell," he told an earlier ceremony in the city of Krakow in southern Poland.
World leaders along with scores of survivors were expected to light candles at the camp's main extermination centre Birkenau, some 70 km (44 miles) from Krakow.
More than 30 heads of state and top officials were attending the ceremonies, including Israeli President Moshe Katsav, U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney, Russian President Vladimir Putin and his German and French counterparts.
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"The story of the camps reminds us that evil is real and must be called by its name and confronted," Cheney said earlier.
"We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror."
The guilt many European nations still feel at either complicity or indifference during the Holocaust has prompted fresh vows of "never again" from their leaders.
But such assurances come against a background of resurging anti-Semitism in Europe, recent mass-killings in Africa and Bosnia and the fading memory of the horrors of World War Two as the war-scarred generation passes away.
Jewish leaders urged Europeans not to erase the history of Auschwitz from their conscience and resist "new anti-Semitism", on the rise in response to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We fear anti-Semitism. We fear Holocaust denial, we fear a distorted approach by the youth of Europe," Katsav said.
French President Jacques Chirac, the first French leader to acknowledge France's complicity in the Holocaust, said the EU would stand united to counter anti-Semitism.
"We are making an unconditional effort to build Europe united in peace and democracy able to crush hatred, intolerance and fanaticism as they arise," he said after opening a memorial to French victims at the camp.
Set up in 1940 by the occupying Nazis, Auschwitz was initially a labour camp for Polish prisoners but gradually grew into a death factory for European Jews shipped there from around Europe and Russia.
At its peak the camp could hold 400,000 people, with thousands killed in gas chambers on arrival after travelling in cattle trains for days without food or water.
More than one million Jews were killed but Gypsies, Poles, Russians also died in the camp. Hundreds were subjected to medical experiments by Nazi doctors trying to prove theories of Aryan supremacy.
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