World remembers liberation of Auschwitz

BRZEZINKA, Poland — Snowflakes swirled around the crematoriums and barbed wire of Auschwitz, and a shrill train whistle pierced the silence as frail survivors and humbled world leaders remembered the victims of the Holocaust on Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.

Candles flickered in the darkening winter gloom of the sprawling site, which Israeli President Moshe Katsav called "the capital of the kingdom of death."

During World War II, 1.5 million people — mostly Jews — were killed at the site. Others who perished there included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, Jehovah's Witnesses, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

The haunting commemoration was held at the place where new arrivals stumbled out of cattle cars and were met by Nazi doctors who chose a few to be worked to death while the rest were sent immediately to gas chambers. Others died of starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.

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

As night fell and the ceremony ended with a locomotive whistle blaring over loudspeakers, a half-mile of train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematoriums were set ablaze in a pyrotechnic display — two flaming rails amid the snow.

The 30 leaders, including Vice President Dick Cheney, Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Jacques Chirac of France, placed candles shielded in blue lanterns on a low stone memorial. Soldiers of a Polish honor guard stood stiffly in the freezing wind. New Ukrainian President Viktor Yushchenko gently set down his candle and made the sign of the cross.

Germany's President Horst Koehler placed a candle but didn't speak, in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust, Adolf Hitler's attempt to wipe out Europe's Jews. In all, some 6 million Jews died in Hitler's network of camps, while several million non-Jews also perished.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau — the occupiers' names for Polish Oswiecim and Brzezinka — on Jan. 27, 1945.

At the ceremony, young girls brought blankets to survivors sitting in the cold.

Auschwitz survivor Gabi Neumann, 68, traveled from his home in Israel and held up a poster that bore the words, "Stop it before it happens again" and the yellow stars of the European Union flag distorted to resemble a swastika.