Royals remember the victims of Holocaust

The Queen joined more than 600 survivors from the concentration camps at memorial event in London, while her youngest son, the Earl of Wessex attended at a poignant ceremony on the snow-covered site of the notorious camp.

He lit a candle in memory of the 1.5 million people who perished at the camp from 1940 until it was liberated by Soviet troops in 1945.

Three British survivors, who escaped the Second World War Nazi slaughter of European Jews, also witnessed the commemoration.

Bob Obuscovski, 76, from Ilford, Essex, Zigi Shipper, 75, from Stanmore, Middlesex, and David Herman, 77, from Hampstead, north London, were VIP guests.

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

Mr Blair said that while the Holocaust Day commemorations had a "very special emotional significance" for the Jewish community, it was important that the whole country remembered what had happened.

"It is a way of remembering what was probably the most terrible event in the history of humanity," he said.

"We should never forget where these things end up. They end up in terrible tensions and in the Holocaust and in the deaths of millions and millions of innocent people in the most appalling and wicked circumstances.

"I think it is very, very right that we have this memorial in Britain."

Major Anatoly Shapiro, who commanded the unit that captured the camp on January 27, 1945, greeted leaders and survivors at a morning Holocaust forum in the Polish city of Krakow ahead of the main ceremony at the Auschwitz and Birkenau camps.

"I would like to say to all the people on the earth, unite and do not permit this evil that was committed," the elderly Shapiro said in a recorded video greeting played in Krakow’s Slovacki theatre. "This should never be repeated, ever.

The forum began with applause for Shapiro, who lives in the United States, and three other Soviet army veterans who helped liberate Auschwitz.

Their chests decorated with medals, they stood in a theatre box to take applause and appeared on stage to receive medals from Polish President Alexander Kwasniewski.

Russian President Vladimir Putin, Kwasniewski, was to join survivors later at the infamous rail siding at the nearby Birkenau camp, where Nazi doctors carried out the "selection" of new arrivals. That meant choosing those deemed able to be worked to death from the majority who were immediately sent to the gas chambers.

Six million Jews died in the Nazi camps, along with several million others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

Vice President Dick Cheney was representing the United States at today’s events. Germany’s President Horst Koehler was to attend, but was not scheduled to speak - an acknowledgement of Germany’s role as the perpetrator of the Holocaust.

He was to address a youth forum called Let My People Live beforehand.

Survivors who returned for the commemoration stressed that each new generation needs 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.

"We can give living testimony . . . to let the world know, to try to get them to learn even though they don’t, so that it doesn’t happen again."

Israeli President Moshe Katsav reminded the Krakow gathering that the camp was now part of the European Union, which Poland joined in May.

"The Holocaust must be placed in the central place of collective memory of the reunited Europe," he said. Ukraine’s newly elected President Viktor Yushchenko, greeted with a standing ovation when he entered the hall, said he brought his children to the occasion and spoke of his father, a wounded Soviet prisoner of war who survived imprisonment in Auschwitz.

"This is a sacred place for me and my family. This is a place where Andrei Yushchenko, my father, suffered.

"There will never be a Jewish question in my country, I vow that," he said.