Netanyahu vows victims of Nazis will never be forgotten

OSWIECIM - Bundled tightly against the cold and snow, elderly survivors walked among the barracks and watchtowers of Auschwitz and Birkenau, many clad in scarves bearing the gray and blue stripes of their Nazi prison garments decades ago.

Moving later into a heated tent to escape the -12C temperatures yesterday, they heard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vow that his country would never allow anyone to erase the memory of the victims of Nazi Germany's death camps.

"We sit in a warm tent and remember those who shivered to death, and if they didn't freeze to death, they were gassed and burned," Netanyahu said in a solemn ceremony marking the 65th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by the Soviet Army.

Some 150 Auschwitz survivors and European leaders were on hand for the International Holocaust Remembrance Day ceremony, one of scores around the world marking the global day of commemoration established by the United Nations in 2005.

"From this damned ground of Auschwitz and Birkenau and the other death camps rise the voices of millions of our brothers and sisters of our people who were suffocated, burned and tortured in a thousand different and unusual deaths," Netanyahu told the crowd in Hebrew.

After brief remarks in English, Netanyahu switched to Hebrew, saying he wanted to use "the newborn language of the people whom the Nazis sought to exterminate" and chanting the first line of the Jewish prayer for the dead.

"My murdered brothers and sisters and brothers who survived the inferno, I came here today from Jerusalem to say to you we will never forget," Netanyahu said. "We will not allow Holocaust deniers and desecrators of grave stones to erase or distort the memory."

Netanyahu's remarks were a clear reference to Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinajad, who has called for Israel's demise and questioned the extent of the Holocaust.

In Iran, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, the nation's Supreme Leader, predicted the destruction of Israel in comments posted on his website yesterday, in some of his strongest remarks about the Jewish state in years.

"Definitely, the day will come when nations of the region will witness the destruction of the Zionist regime," Khamenei was quoted as saying. "How soon or late [Israel's demise] will happen depends on how Islamic countries and Muslim nations approach the issue."

United States President Barack Obama, in a video message, thanked Holocaust survivors for finding "the strength to come back again, so many years later, despite the horror you saw here, the suffering you endured here, and the loved ones you lost here".

"We have a sacred duty to remember the twisted thinking that led here - how a great society of culture and science succumbed to the worst instincts of man and rationalised mass murder and one of the most barbaric acts in history," Obama said.

Obama also thanked Polish leaders and the people "for preserving a place of such great pain for the Polish people, but a place of remembrance and learning for the world".

Poland's President Lech Kaczynski recalled the pain of the Polish nation, which was occupied by Nazi Germany throughout the war, but also acknowledged the unique suffering of Jews, who were targeted for extermination.

"Jews were being murdered only because they were Jews," said Kaczynski, a strong supporter of Poland's reviving Jewish community.

"Many others were killed only because they were Poles or Russians, Ukrainians or Belarusians. But there was no death sentence for the whole nation."

By the end of World War II, at least 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, but also non-Jewish Poles, Gypsies and others, had died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz-Birkenau or from starvation, disease and forced labour.

Some six million Jews overall were killed in the Holocaust.

- AP