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Light in the darkness

World leaders and survivors of the Nazi death camp gather to mourn and deliver a message: Never forget.

BRZEZINKA, Poland - A half-mile of railroad tracks blazed in the wintry dusk, marking what had been the final journey for many into the Nazi death camp. A train whistle split the silence. Snowflakes swirled through the barbed wire and dusted the crematoriums.

Frail survivors and humbled world leaders mourned the victims of the Holocaust on Thursday, the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, by urging the world to never forget.

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

During World War II, about 1.5-million people - mostly Jews - were killed at the site.

The haunting commemoration was held 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," said Katsav, one of 30 presidents and prime ministers at the ceremony. "When I walk the ground of the concentration camps, I fear that I am walking on the ashes of the victims."

As the ceremony ended with a locomotive whistle blaring from loudspeakers, a half-mile of train tracks leading from the front gate to the crematoriums were set ablaze - two flaming straight lines through snow, toward death.

The leaders, including Vice President Dick Cheney, and Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia and Jacques Chirac of France, placed candles shielded in blue lanterns on a 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.

German President Horst Koehler placed a candle but didn't speak, in recognition of his country's responsibility for the Holocaust.

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

The Auschwitz-Birkenau complex has become the foremost symbol of the Nazi attempt to extinguish European Jewry.

The camp's first victims were Poles. An estimated 75,000 Poles - mainly intellectuals, professionals, priests and members of the underground resistance - were killed as part of the Third Reich's plan to make Poland a slave nation by eliminating its intelligentsia.

French parliamentarian Simone Veil, who was imprisoned here as a 17-year-old, pondered the children who didn't survive, among them her sister.

"What would have become of them, these millions of Jewish children ... murdered here or in the ghettos or in other death camps? Would they have become philosophers? Artists? Great scientists? Or perhaps just skilled craftsmen or mothers of families? All I know is that I weep whenever I think of them," she said.

Many of the survivors who gathered for the anniversary displayed their inmate numbers on their clothing or wore the rough striped caps that were issued to prisoners. Some wore the red triangle patches that the Nazis issued to Polish political prisoners to distinguish them from Jews.

Survivor Gabi Neumann, 68, of Israel 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.

"I made this poster because anti-Semitism is a big problem in Europe," said Neumann, who was 8 when he was freed from the camp. Originally from Slovakia, he lost a grandmother at Auschwitz.

"But she has no grave," he said. "I am happy there is snow here because it keeps me from standing on her ashes."

Putin compared the Nazis with modern terrorists.

"Today we shall not only remember the past but also be aware of all the threats of the modern world," he said.

Putin made repeated references to "fascist beasts" and "fascist barbarians" and the valor of Soviet soldiers in defeating the Nazis, but in keeping with Soviet orthodoxy, he made no reference to the unique suffering of the Jews.

Earlier in Krakow, Cheney noted that the Holocaust did not happen in some far-off place but "in the heart of the civilized world."

"The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted," he said.

People at the ceremony expressed concern over recent incidents such as a walkout from an Auschwitz commemoration by far-right local legislators in Germany, and a statement from far-right National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen in France, who minimized the brutality of Nazi rule during the occupation by German troops.

"In my life I have attended hundreds of regional and international ceremonies, but I do not think there will be another similar to this one," said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a former Polish underground fighter, prisoner No. 4427 at Auschwitz, and later Poland's foreign minister.

"The question to be asked of ourselves and the world is: How much of the truth about those horrible experiences of totalitarianism have we managed to pass down to younger generations? Much of it, I believe, but not enough," Bartoszewski said.

Camp survivor Franczisek Jozefiak, 80, of Krakow said the world still needed reminding.

"Today I'm remembering my father, gassed here. I'm remembering the atrocious things they did to us here," said Jozefiak.

The Nazi guards lined them up and told some to go right, others left, he said. Jozefiak went left and his father went right and was taken to the gas chamber.

"The message today is: No more Auschwitz," he said. "But the world has learned nothing so far - you see they are fighting and killing each other everywhere in the world. Today they are saying a lot because of the anniversary, but tomorrow they will forget."

Evy Mozses Kor, 70, of Terre Haute, Ind., swept a hand toward her fellow survivors. "Just look at all of us," she said. "Here we are, 60 years after the Nazis were defeated, after almost all of the old Nazis are gone, and here we are, standing and celebrating 60 years of freedom."

Kor, who was kept alive because she had a twin, and Nazi death doctor Joseph Mengele experimented on twins, smiled. "To be honest, I plan on coming back on the 100th anniversary. Wouldn't the Nazis have loved that?"

Information from the Chicago Tribune and Knight Ridder Newspapers was used in this report.

Largest Nazi concentration camp, comprising Auschwitz and Birkenau camps, with smaller camps nearby.

Established 1940 in an abandoned army base in the Polish city of Oswiecim (in German, Auschwitz); expanded 1941-44. Auschwitz II, Birkenau, contained most of the gas chambers and crematoria.

Main gate sign: ARBEIT MACHT FREI (Work Makes You Free)

Liberated Jan. 27, 1945, by Soviet troops, freeing 7,000 prisoners.

Estimated number of victims: 1.1-million Jews, 150,000 Poles, 23,000 Gypsies, 15,000 Soviet prisoners, 10,000 other foreign prisoners.

[Last modified January 28, 2005, 00:22:07]