'Evil is real'
2005-01-27 16:16
Auschwitz - World leaders on Thursday issued emotional pleas for the horrors of the Holocaust never to be forgotten, as they prepared to mark the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp 60 years ago.
Under a blanket of snow, a train pulling along the tracks once used to herd more than a million people to the Auschwitz-Birkenau extermination camp in southern Poland was to mark the start of the main ceremony with a haunting whistle.
About 10 000 people, including about 1 000 survivors, were expected to pay tribute to about 1.1 million people who died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945.
Most of them were Jews exterminated in the gas chambers of the most grimly efficient of the Nazi death camps. They were among the six million people who perished during the Nazi regime's chilling "Final Solution".
The day of solemn events and remembrances began with an international forum gathering young people, survivors and politicians, and with a plea from Polish President Aleksander Kwasniewski to "ensure that future generations never forget".
World has not learnt lesson
Addressed the gathering of 400 people, he lamented that "the world has not always heeded the sad lesson of Nazi crimes."
United States vice-president Dick Cheney also urged future generations to take heed of the message of evil embodied in Auschwitz and the Nazi regime.
"The story of the camp reminds us that evil is real. It must be called by its name and must be confronted," said Cheney.
Cheney was to be among 44 world leaders at the main commemoration starting at 14:30, also being attended by former Soviet Red Army soldiers who liberated the camp on January 27 1945.
Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that the world still had reason to be ashamed today noting that even in Russia, "which has done the most to defeat fascim, to liberate Jews, we see frequent signs of this disease (anti-Semitism) and we are embarrassed of this".
The open-air ceremony, also being attended by members of European royalty, was to be held at a memorial erected at the camp's Birkenau complex, between the ruins of two of gas chambers that were capable of claiming thousands of lives every day.
Historians have been unable to say precisely how many people died here, and the actual death toll is believed to be as high as two million.
At the morning forum, Kwasniewski also decorated several former Red Army soldiers who liberated the camp during one of eastern Europe's severest winters when temperatures fell as low as minus 30°C.
Meanwhile Britain's chief rabbi Dr Jonathan Sacks made a plea to remember the Holocaust and its lessons without hate, saying hatred was just destructive.
"The lessons of the Holocaust are simple to understand however hard they are to live. Never blame others for your troubles. A society is as large as the space it makes for the stranger. Cherish life. Fight for the rights of others," he wrote in The Daily Telegraph.
- AFP