Reliving Auschwitz

OSWIECIM, Poland -- Vandalized Jewish graves in western Europe. Growing support for extreme-right parties in Germany. Comments by France's far-right leader playing down the evils of the Nazi occupation.

Decades after World War II, many think the lessons of the Holocaust still need reinforcing in Europe. Survivors from Auschwitz, gathered for today's 60th anniversary of the Nazi death camp's liberation, vowed to keep telling their story to make sure that happens.

Trudy Spira, who came from Venezuela for the ceremonies, said Wednesday renewed efforts to educate people about the dangers of hatred were even more important as the generation that experienced the Holocaust ages.

"It's very important, you are the last generation that can talk to the survivors, we are every day less," said Spira, who was deported to Auschwitz with her family as an 11-year-old from Slovakia in 1944.

An estimated 1 million Holocaust survivors are still alive.

"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," Spira, 72, said at a news conference held by the European Jewish Forum in Krakow, about an hour's drive from Oscwiecim, the town where the camp is located.

Romanian-born Auschwitz survivor Olly Ritterband from Copenhagen, Denmark, whose book "Will To Survive" is read in Danish schools, made the painful effort for her father, who died at the Dachau concentration camp in Germany.

"For more than 30 years, I couldn't speak about the Holocaust," said Ritterband, 80, who lost 70 relatives in the Holocaust.

Leaders including Vice President Dick Cheney, Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and Israeli President Moshe Katsav are to light candles and hear interfaith prayers at the sprawling camp to mark the arrival of advancing Soviet troops on Jan. 27, 1945, as World War II neared its end.

Germany's President Horst Koehler will attend but won't speak at the main ceremony in acknowledgment of Germany's role as perpetrator of the Holocaust. He is to address a youth forum about the Holocaust in Krakow.

Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews from across Europe, died in gas chambers or of disease, starvation, abuse and exhaustion at Auschwitz and neighboring Birkenau -- the most notorious of the death camps set up by Adolf Hitler to carry out his "final solution," the murder of Europe's Jewish population.

Six million Jews died in the Nazi camps, along with several million others.