World leaders gather to remember horrors of Auschwitz

Braving freezing temperatures and driven snow, octogenarian survivors and world leaders gathered yesterday for a heart-rending, sometimes jarring ceremony within the most murderously efficient of all Nazi death camps.

Braving freezing temperatures and driven snow, octogenarian survivors and world leaders gathered yesterday for a heart-rending, sometimes jarring ceremony within the most murderously efficient of all Nazi death camps.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Vice-President Dick Cheney of the US, Prince Edward and President Jacques Chirac of France were among representatives of 40 nations at the four-hour commemoration of the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau by the Red Army.

Yards from the rubble of the gas chambers where at least 1,100,000 died, politicians and religious leaders gave solemn pledges that anti-Semitism would not be tolerated and the Holocaust would never be allowed to happen again.

The ceremony was the centrepiece of events held all over the world to remember the attempt by Nazi Germany to destroy "undesirables", which led to the deaths of at least five million and maybe as many as six million Jews, as well as hundreds of thousands of Poles and tens of thousands of Gypsies.

In London, 600 Holocaust survivors at a memorial service in Westminster Hall in the Palace of Westminster were joined by the Queen, the Duke of Edinburgh, Tony and Cherie Blair, Charles Clarke, the Home Secretary, and leading figures from the Jewish community and representatives from other faiths. Sixty survivors, many infirm, lit candles to mark each year since the liberation; many were wiping away tears.

Dr Jonathan Sacks, the Chief Rabbi, said the Holocaust was the "greatest crime of man against man". He said: "We ... weep for a murdered generation; the young, the old, the innocent, the million and a half children, gassed, burnt and turned to ash because they were different."

Mr Blair said younger generations might ask what relevance the commemoration has for them. "It reminds us of suffering beyond imagination, not just because of the miserable and wretched cruelty endured by the Holocaust victims, but because of how it was inflicted," he said. "It was death as an industry, not just the destruction of human life, but of human essence, done with a barbarity we can scarcely contemplate.''

The most moving moment at Auschwitz-Birkenau was unscheduled. An Auschwitz survivor seized the microphone to express a bewildered anger, undiminished by six decades. The woman, dressed in white, and wearing a Star of David, said: "I was a number. Why? Why did they burn my nation? It will never happen again. I stood here naked in this camp as a 16-year-old girl ... I am standing here again ..." Her voice trailed away in the swirling snow.

More than 300 Auschwitz survivors had gathered for the ceremony beside the international memorial between the ruins of Crematorium Two and Crematorium Three. These were the most advanced and effective combined gas chambers and crematoria - linked by a lift to remove bodies - built by the Nazis in 1944 and destroyed just before the Russians arrived.

The survivors, probably in such large numbers for the last time, wore furs and blankets to keep out the Polish winter. Many also wore the thin blue and grey skull-caps worn by Auschwitz inmates.

To symbolise the burning of the bodies, the Polish organisers had constructed a line of open, metal towers containing a stack of braziers. White lanterns shone along the half-mile railway siding in the camp.

The ceremony began with a recording of a steam train arriving at a station, and the doors being flung open. At the sound, many survivors bowed their heads. When a train arrived, children, mothers and usually anyone infirm or aged over 35 were taken immediately to the gas chambers. The remainder were stripped, shaved, tattooed with a number and forced to labour in the camp and surrounding SS-run factories.

Simone Veil, a former French health minister, who was brought by train to Auschwitz from Drancy, north of Paris, at the age of 16 in 1943, said: "I still cry each time I think of all the children ... I will never be able to forget the children."

The two most jarring notes were struck by Mr Putin and the Israeli President, Moshe Katsav. Mr Putinimplicitly compared the battle against Nazism with his uncompromising approach to Russia's war in Chechnya. "Terrorism, like fascism, is a sly, dangerous enemy," he said. "Just as there cannot be good and bad fascists, there cannot be good and bad terrorists."

Mr Katsav recalled the complicity of the administrations of many German-occupied countries in deporting Jews to death camps. He suggested the Allies knew of the mass murder of Jews from 1942 and could have saved thousands by bombing the camps or the railway lines to them. Instead, he said, the Allies "chose to do nothing". This version of events is not accepted by all historians, even Jewish ones.

The ceremony ended in the freezing twilight. Politicians placed candles on the monument to the Auschwitz dead. The Auschwitz living, by now shivering with cold, gradually melted away.