World remembers Auschwitz victims

[Gypsy-Rhiannon]

Dozens of world leaders will pay their respects at a ceremony at the Auschwitz death camp where up to 1.5 million Jews died at the hands of the Nazis.

The camp, near Krakow, in Poland, is the site of the greatest mass murder in the history of humanity. Its gas chambers and furnaces are a symbol of terror, unimaginable suffering and death.

The Queen's youngest son will light a candle in memory of over 6 million Holocaust victims at a ceremony marking the 60th anniversary of the camp's liberation by Russian soldiers.

Edward, Earl of Wessex will be joined by Foreign Secretary Jack Straw at the Holocaust Memorial Day ceremony.

Before the ceremony, Edward will meet relatives of the 39 British prisoners of war killed in an air raid by American bombers on the Monowice concentration camp in Poland.

Among the leaders of 37 countries attending the ceremony are Israeli President Moshe Katsav, Germany's President Horst Kohler, Russian President Vladimir Putin, US Vice President Dick Cheney, President Jacques Chirac of France, newly-elected President of Ukraine Viktor Yushchenko and Ireland's President Mary McAleese.

Three British survivors, will witness the commemoration. Bob Obuscovski, 76, from Ilford, Essex, Zigi Shipper, 75, from Stanmore, Middlesex, and David Herman, 77, from Hampstead, north London, are VIP guests.

The 100-minute outdoor ceremony, in sub-zero temperatures, will be attended by heads of state or their representatives from around the world.

Former Auschwitz inmates Wladyslaw Bartoszewski - prisoner 4427 - Simone Veil - prisoner 78651 - and Romani Rose, on behalf of the many gypsies put to death at the camp, will address the gathering.

Gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, alcoholics, the mentally ill, the disabled and the homeless also faced extermination in their hundreds of thousands.

If the victims had not been gassed, shot or tortured to death in a criminal medical experiment at the hands of the infamous Dr Josef Mengele, they had surrendered life to disease or starvation.

Many survivors were so close to death that the only sign of life on their bony bodies was the lice eating into their flesh.

The camp is now a museum and monument to the 1,100,000 to 1,500,000 people, mostly Jews, who were systematically slaughtered there during the 1939-1945 German occupation.

Barbed-wire fences, punctuated by watchtowers, define the landscape where Adolf Hitler's henchmen constructed a purpose-built killing machine employing ruthless efficiency.

Jews arrived packed in cattle trucks to be methodically murdered in the gas chambers and their bodies burned in furnaces. When the crematoria could not cope with the vastness of the slaughter, the Nazis resorted to digging pits.

As the Allies closed in on Hitler's defeated armies, the Nazis attempted to destroy the evidence of their evil. They failed - and close to the ceremony are the ruins of gas chambers blown up by the SS.