Leaders and Survivors Gather at Auschwitz

World leaders and Holocaust survivors today gather to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz.

Twenty nine world leaders will gather at the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in Poland - where up to 1.5 million people died - to pay their respects.

Soviet troops reached the camp on January 27, 1945, finding 7,000 survivors, many barely alive. The retreating Nazis had driven most of the prisoners who still had strength to walk out into the snow on a "death march" toward camps further west.

Today Jack Straw, Vladimir Putin and Dick Cheney will join the Israeli and Polish presidents and survivors at the infamous rail siding at 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 that were immediately to the gas chambers.

Six million Jews died in the Nazi camps, along with several million others, including Soviet prisoners of war, Roma gypsies, homosexuals, beggars, alcoholics, mentally ill and disabled people and political opponents of the Nazis.

In Auschwitz and Birkenau - the most notorious of the death camps - up to 1.5 million people died in the gas chambers or of disease, starvation, abuse and exhaustion.

The German president, Horst Köhler, will attend but is not scheduled to speak.

In Britain, the Queen, Tony Blair and religious leaders will join more than 600 victims from the concentration camps and ghettos in a ceremony marking the atrocities.

Grandchildren of the survivors will read a list of 3,000 of their relatives who perished at the hands of the Nazis. As part of the programme, the Queen will lead survivors by lighting the first of 60 candles in Westminster Hall.

Former soldier Charles Salt, 87, who entered the Belsen camp in Germany shortly after it was liberated by the British in 1945, will escort the Duke of Edinburgh to his place.

Prince Harry, who sparked outrage with his Nazi soldier fancy dress uniform, is not attending an official event.

Survivors who returned to Poland 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."

The German foreign minister, Joschka Fischer, will attend memorial events this evening In the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, which was once a vibrant hub of Jewish culture.

More than 65,000 Greek Jews - nearly 90% of the country's prewar population - were killed during the second world war, many of them at Auschwitz. There are now around 5,000 Jews in Greece.

David Saltiel, head of Thessaloniki's 1,100-strong Jewish community, said the memorials did not concern Jews alone. "It is an event to mark acts of barbarism, and it concerns anyone who believes in the value of freedom."

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday said that the Holocaust had taught Jews that they could rely on no one but themselves for their survival.

"The allies knew of the annihilation of the Jews. They knew and did nothing," he told the Israeli parliament.

"When, in the summer of 1944, the mass deportations in Hungary were carried out, the allies did not bomb the train tracks which led to Auschwitz from Hungary, nor the murder facilities in Birkenau, and this was despite the fact that they had the ability to do so."

The home secretary, Charles Clarke, said the Holocaust had taught the responsibility" of ensuring a democratic and tolerant society, free of the evils of prejudice, racism and other forms of bigotry, lies on us all".