Among them was Arek Hersh, who arrived aged 14, and who eventually became one of a group of orphans who were resettled in Windermere in Britain.
Hersh, who now lives in Leeds and still bears his camp tattoo - B7608 - has made numerous visits to Auschwitz, usually in the company of parties of schoolchildren on educational trips. But he said that no amount of return trips ever diminished the terror instilled in him during his time there in 1944, when he arrived with 185 other children. Only one other survived.
"I shudder every time I think about this place," Hersh said as he stood in the shadow of the camp's barbed wire. "I can't control the fear."
Hersh, 85, was categorised as "healthy" by the SS when he arrived at the camp, and so was spared instant dispatch in its gas chambers. He was taken out of Auschwitz four days before it was liberated by Soviet troops in January 1945, and forced on a three-day death march through deep snow to Buchenwald, the inmates wearing only their striped prison pyjamas.
"People died from cold, and others who fell behind were shot in the back of the head," he recalled.
"When I think of all the terrible things that happened to us, how we lived, how we died - it's a reminder of what men can do to each other."
With the camp covered in heavy snow, inmates and dignitaries at the commemoration gathered in a giant tent erected over the entrance to Birkenau, where trains arrived carrying around 1.5 million people - most of them Jews - to their deaths.
In the surrounding countryside, the railway tracks were illuminated.
With the emphasis on remembering the experiences of the victims, the foreign dignitaries present did not make speeches during the commemorations. However, Steven Spielberg, the Hollywood film director who won an Oscar for the Holocaust drama Schindler's List, screened a film about life in Auschwitz.
Hanging heavily over the event was a sense that some of the dark forces that led to World War II were stalking Europe once again, with Jews targeted by the recent Islamist attacks in Paris, and Russia's ongoing war in Ukraine.
The Polish Government, which has been a leading critic of Vladimir Putin's military meddling in Ukraine, made a point of not sending him a full diplomatic invitation to the ceremony. Instead, he was represented by his chief of staff, Sergei Ivanov.
As he prepared to visit the camp, Spielberg condemned "the growing effort to banish Jews from Europe". His remarks were backed by President Francois Hollande of France, who sought to reassure his country's 550,000-strong Jewish community in the wake of the attack by Islamist gunmen that killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris.
"You, French people of the Jewish faith, your place is here, in your home. France is your country," he said, speaking earlier in the day at the Paris Shoah memorial to French Jewish victims of the Nazis.
The renewed sense of urgency over the need to fight anti-Semitism was summed up by another survivor, Roman Kent, who is president of the International Auschwitz Committee. "We survivors do not want our past to be our children's future," he said.
He also called for the world to observe what he described as an 11th Commandment - "You should never be a bystander".
