Europe marks Holocaust Day

OSWIECIM, Poland -- Survivors of Auschwitz have gone on a poignant march past the gas chambers which claimed their fellow prisoners as Europe marked Holocaust memorial day.

About 700 people, including camp survivors and local Jewish leaders, walked on Saturday from the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp's Gate of Death to its giant memorial wall, past the remains of the gas chambers and the crematoria.

The Nazis killed 1.5 million people in Auschwitz, the highest number at any camp, before hastily retreating from an advancing Soviet army which liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.

The Auschwitz-Birkenau camp, regarded as the world's largest Jewish burial ground, now houses a museum and is little changed from the day Red Army troops freed its last inmates.

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Polish Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek told the participants in a letter that they were the "guardians of this tragic heritage of mankind."

Ceremonies from London to Lithuania marked the 56th anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp's liberation.

Britain and Italy held their first-ever Holocaust memorial days, while survivors, spiritual leaders and politicians across the continent pledged to remember a grim historical lesson about the consequences of intolerance.

"Not everyone who survived has the strength to share," said Auschwitz survivor Hedi Fried, speaking at a forum in Stockholm, Sweden. "We who can have an extra obligation. We owe it to our murdered parents, the 6 million Jews, 500,000 Gypsies and countless homosexuals, Russians and Poles who died."

Britain observed its first national Holocaust Memorial Day with ceremonies across the country and a London service that also honours victims of other 20th-century genocides.

The guest list for the memorial at Westminster Central Hall in London included Prince Charles, Prime Minister Tony Blair, the archbishops of Canterbury and Westminster and Britain's chief rabbi, Jonathan Sacks. The ceremony included tributes to survivors of violence in Cambodia, Bosnia and Rwanda.

In Germany, where a sharp rise this year in violent attacks on minorities gave the annual Day of Remembrance for Victims of Nazism added resonance, Parliament president Wolfgang Thierse issued a warning about the dangers of neo-Nazism.

Germans must show "commitment to democracy and against raging right-wing extremism," he told Deutschland Radio. "This isn't about remembrance without consequences."

Six million Jews and five million others, including communists, homosexuals, gypsies and the mentally retarded, perished under the Nazi regime.

Italy also marked Holocaust Memorial Day for the first time, with a ceremony in Milan organised by Italian unions and a moment of silence during evening soccer games. Padua, in northern Italy, was honouring Giorgio Perlasca, a butcher credited with saving more than 5,000 Italian Jews by pretending to be a Spanish diplomat.

Italian President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi acknowledged Italy's blame in the Holocaust, calling Benito Mussolini's racial laws a betrayal of the country's founding principles.

"But numerous Italians knew how to further the demands of their conscience against the violence of the dictator," he said.

About 7,000 Jews were deported from Italy during the Holocaust, and 5,910 of them died.

Lithuanian Jews gathered in Vilnius to mark the anniversary, and in Sweden, Prime Minister Goeran Persson was attending a ceremony at a Stockholm synagogue. The Jewish Museum planned a lecture, music and a reading from Anne Frank's diary.

United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan was to give the keynote speech in Sweden on Monday at an international conference on ethnic and religious intolerance.

The Associated Press & Reuters contributed to this report.

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