On January 27, world leaders gathered near Krakow, Poland, to honor the 60th anniversary of the freeing of Auschwitz's concentration camps. Government officials from countries including Germany, Israel, and the U.S. came to honor the memory of those who died in the Holocaust.
The Nazis, who led Germany during World War II, tortured and murdered nearly 1.5 million people at Auschwitz. Most of the victims were Jewish. Nearly 6 million Jews were killed during this era. "It seems if you listen hard enough, you can still hear the outcry of horror of the murdered people," said Israeli President Moshe Katsav.
Survivors of the Holocaust urged those present not to forget the death camps' horrors and not to let such mass killings happen again. Some warned the world to pay attention to killings in Africa and other parts of the world.
Wladyslaw Bartoszewski is a camp survivor who went on to become Poland's foreign minister. "For a former inmate of Auschwitz," he said, "it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to speak in this cemetery without graves."
Anatoly Shapiro, 92, was a soldier who helped to free Auschwitz. The Holocaust "should never be repeated, ever," he said.