Remembering Auschwitz - a tragedy for all mankind

AS candles flickered in the snowy, winter gloom, world leaders and Auschwitz survivors yesterday remembered victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.

The ceremony, which opened with the recorded rumble of an approaching train, was held on the spot where new arrivals were brought in by rail to the vast camp and put through "selection" - meaning those few who were deemed able to work were separated from the rest who were taken immediately to the gas chambers.

"It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," Israeli President Moshe Katsav said. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."

Joining in the commemoration were President Vladimir Putin of Russia, Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland and Jacques Chirac of France, and US Vice-President Dick Cheney. German President Horst Koehler sat on the platform without speaking in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust, in which six million Jews died.

Elderly survivors, many accompanied by younger relatives, and some wrapped in blankets to keep warm, walked slowly past the rusting wire fences under a dark gray sky and heavily falling snow toward a monument to the victims.

Barbed wire and brick barracks stretched as far as the eye could see. The ruined crematoriums loomed nearby, all covered with a layer of fresh snow.

"For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland's foreign minister.

When he arrived in 1940, he recalled: "I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II."

When Nazi Germany realised it was losing the war, it tried to destroy evidence of the atrocities it had committed at the camp, and evacuated tens of thousands of prisoners in the dead of one of the coldest winters last century in what came to be known as the Death Marches.

Only the sick and feeble were left behind for Soviet troops to find when they prised open the camp's gates 60 years ago.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the neighbouring camp at Birkenau on January 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, had died at the two camps from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.

One of the Soviet soldiers at the forum, 79-year-old Genry Koptiev-Gomolov, said that even the horrors of war had not prepared him for what saw in Auschwitz.

"The prisoners were so emaciated you could see the veins in their faces, their hands were just bones covered with skin," he said.

Mr Putin paid tribute to the Soviet troops, not just for freeing Auschwitz but also for helping to liberate Europe from the Nazis.

Like the other leaders who had addressed the gathering, the Russian president also warned the world to guard against a resurgence of anti-Semitism.

"The Holocaust is not just a Jewish tragedy, it is a tragedy for all mankind," Mr Putin said.

"We must proclaim in one voice: no one has a right to be indifferent to anti-Semitism, xenophobia and racial intolerance."