'This must not happen again'

People walk behind barbed wire at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27 2005, the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation
People walk behind barbed wire at Auschwitz-Birkenau on January 27 2005, the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation. Photograph: Jockel Finck/AP
The commander of the Soviet troops who liberated Auschwitz today said that the world should never forget what his men found there.

As world leaders joined survivors at the Nazi death camp to remember the millions of people killed in the Holocaust, Anatoly Shapiro recalled the day, 60 years ago, when he entered Auschwitz.

"I saw the faces of the people we liberated - they went through hell," he said via a video link from the US, where he now lives. "I want to say to all people around the world - this should not happen again."

Built by Nazi Germany in occupied southern Poland, Auschwitz had initially been a labour camp for Polish prisoners, but became a death factory for European Jews.

The ceremony started with the sound of an approaching train on the tracks that brought more than 1 million people to their deaths. It took place by the sidings where Nazi doctors decided which of the new arrivals were fit to be worked to death and which were to be taken to the gas chambers.

"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 survivor Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, who later became Poland's foreign minister.

Vladimir Putin, the Russian president, said the sight of rail tracks and the gas chambers would always lead people to ask how the Holocaust could happen.

"Auschwitz calls out not only to our memory but to our mind," he said. "We see what future the fascist Reich had planned for a civilised Europe."

Moshe Katsav, the Israeli president, said Auschwitz was the "largest burial ground of the Jewish people". He warned of the re-emergence of anti-semitism in Europe and said it was up to the present generation of leaders to make sure the lessons of Auschwitz were not forgotten.

The ceremony ended with the playing of a Jewish horn - the shofar - and the Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for the dead.

Mr Putin, Mr Katsav, the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, later joined Aleksander Kwasniewski, thePolish president, and scores of Red Army veterans and survivors to light candles at the camp's main extermination centre, Birkenau.


In Auschwitz-Birkenau - the most notorious of the complexes - 1.5 million people died in the gas chambers or of disease, starvation, abuse and exhaustion.

Soviet troops reached the camp on January 27 1945, and found 7,000 survivors, many of them barely alive. The retreating Nazis had driven most of the prisoners who still had strength to walk out into the snow on a "death march" toward camps further west.

"The snow was falling like today, we were dressed in stripes and some of us had bare feet," 84-year-old Polish survivor Kazimierz Orlowski said. "These were horrible times."

International memorials

Twenty-nine world leaders were in attendance. The Ukrainian president, Viktor Yushchenko, recalled his father's ordeal in the death camp as he spoke in nearby Krakow before the ceremony began.

"My father was a wounded soldier and he was in Auschwitz. He had a tattoo 11367 on his chest," he said.

"This is a sacred place for me and my family. This is the place where my father suffered."

He said on his last trip to Auschwitz he had gathered up soil which he presented to a meeting of Ukrainian Jews.

The German president, Horst Köhler, attended the memorial event, but was not scheduled to speak in a token acknowledgment of his country's role as perpetrator of the Holocaust.

In Britain, the Queen, Tony Blair and religious leaders joined more than 600 victims from the concentration camps and ghettos at Westminster Hall.

One of the survivors, 74-year-old Susan Pollack, said she had not been able to talk about her suffering at the hands of the Nazis for many years afterwards.

Budapest-born Mrs Pollack, then aged 14, had already been in Belsen for a year - having been transferred from Auschwitz - when Allied troops liberated the camp.

"My mother was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. My father was taken away, and I still don't know what happened to him. I was imbued by shame. The process of dehumanisation had affected my life," she said.

Major Dick Williams, 84, one of the first Allied soldiers to enter Belsen, said he had been shown the devastation by two SS officers.

"I could not believe what I was seeing - the horror that was there. You had to pick your way through the camp because of the people who had died, some hanging from the barbed wire."

Former soldier Charles Salt, 87, who entered the Belsen camp in Germany shortly after it was liberated by the British in 1945, escorted the Duke of Edinburgh to his place at the ceremony.


Survivors who returned to Auschwitz for the commemoration stressed that each new generation needed to be educated about the Holocaust.

"It's very important. You are the last generation that can talk to the survivors, we are every day less," Trudy Spira, who was deported to Auschwitz in 1944 with her family as an 11-year-old from Slovakia, told reporters in Krakow.


The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, will this evening attend memorial events in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, once a vibrant hub of Jewish culture.

More than 65,000 Greek Jews - almost 90% of the country's pre-war Jewish population - were killed during the second world war, many of them at Auschwitz. There are now around 5,000 Jews in Greece.
