'This Must Not Happen Again'

The commander of the Soviet troops who liberated Auschwitz today said that the world should never forget what his men found there.

As world leaders joined survivors at the Nazi death camp to remember the millions of people killed in the Holocaust, Anatoly Shapiro recalled the day, 60 years ago, when he entered Auschwitz.

"I saw the faces of the people we liberated - they went through hell," he said via a video link from the US, where he now lives. "I want to say to all people around the world - this should not happen again."

Built by Nazi Germany in occupied southern Poland, Auschwitz had initially been a labour camp for Polish prisoners, but became a death factory for European Jews.

The Russian president, Vladimir Putin, the US vice president, Dick Cheney, and the foreign secretary, Jack Straw, will later join the Israeli and Polish presidents and scores of survivors to light candles at the camp's main extermination centre, Birkenau.

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

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

Soviet troops reached the camp on January 27 1945, and found 7,000 survivors, many of them 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.

"The snow was falling like today, we were dressed in stripes and some of us had bare feet," 84-year-old Polish survivor Kazimierz Orlowski said. "These were horrible times."

The German president, Horst Köhler, will attend the memorial event, 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 to mark the atrocities.

One of the survivors, 74-year-old Susan Pollack, said she had not been able to talk about her suffering at the hands of the Nazis for many years afterwards.

Budapest-born Mrs Pollack, then aged 14, had already been in Belsen for a year - having been transferred from Auschwitz - when Allied troops liberated the camp.

"My mother was gassed on arrival at Auschwitz. My father was taken away, and I still don't know what happened to him. I was imbued by shame. The process of dehumanisation had affected my life," she said.

Major Dick Williams, 84, one of the first Allied soldiers to enter Belsen, said he had been shown the devastation by two SS officers.

"I could not believe what I was seeing - the horror that was there. You had to pick your way through the camp because of the people who had died, some hanging from the barbed wire."

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 at the ceremony.

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

Survivors who returned to Auschwitz for the commemoration stressed that each new generation needed 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 this evening attend memorial events in the northern Greek city of Thessaloniki, once a vibrant hub of Jewish culture.

More than 65,000 Greek Jews - almost 90% of the country's prewar Jewish 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," he added.

The Israeli prime minister, Ariel Sharon, yesterday said 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," Mr Sharon 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 Conservative leader, Michael Howard, said that his grandmother's death in Auschwitz and his aunt's narrow escape from the gas chambers had had a significant impact on his political philosophy.

"I think one of the most horrifying things that the whole Nazi experience teaches us is that all too often, civilisation is skin-deep, and that not very far beneath the surface of many people - perhaps all of us, in a way - are instincts and prejudices which, if we don't make a real attempt to confront them, could lead to terrible things."