Outside, the muffled chimes of Big Ben struck three, the hour at which, 60 years before to the day, even the hardened troops of the Soviet Army were confounded by the sight that greeted them as they broke down the gates of Auschwitz.

Inside, 600 survivors of the Nazis’ industrial genocide, and an equal number of their friends and families, watched a video in which Susan Pollack, who had stumbled as a skeletal teenager out of the gates of Belsen into the arms of Allied liberators, revisited the death camps. She spoke of the moment she learnt that her mother had been gassed and did not cry. “There was no good crying; crying is part of normal life. There was nothing normal there.”

During her recent visit to Belsen Mrs Pollack lit a candle. Its flame, safe inside an old-fashioned miner’s lamp, was brought back to Britain under army escort and carried through Westminster Hall yesterday to light 60 candles, one for each year since liberation.

The Queen, who led yesterday’s Holocaust Memorial Day commemoration, lit the first, and the Duke of Edinburgh the second. The Holocaust touched even the Duke’s family; his mother Princess Andrew of Greece sheltered a Jewish family when the Germans invaded her country, and she is now recognised as a Righteous Gentile by Yad Vashem, the Holocaust Memorial in Jerusalem.

The royal couple were followed to the candle-lighting by 60 survivors, elderly men and women whose very presence on a winter’s day in a building redolent of English parliamentary history they would regard as a joyous miracle had not every one of them lost parents, siblings, family and friends.

Tony Blair, who lent his support to the establishment of a Holocaust Memorial Day five years ago, spoke of a suffering beyond imagination, but one that had happened in the lifetime of his father. Among his silent, attentive audience was his political adversary Michael Howard, who lost his grandmother in the death camps.

The Holocaust, Mr Blair reminded his audience, had not started with the death camps; it had started with a brick through a Jewish trader’s window, the burning of a synagogue — countless small but hateful acts that snowballed into the destruction not only of life, but of human essence.

Stephen Fry, the comedian whose Jewish grandparents emigrated safely to Britain from Central Europe, attempted to put the figure of six million Holocaust dead into some kind of recognisable form; it was the population of six cities the size of Birmingham, or every name in 55 phone directories, or a queue of people from London to Moscow and back.

To reinforce the point, a group of children recited the names of 3,000 relatives of those survivors present who had perished in the ovens and gas chambers, or through hunger, disease and neglect.

Ade Adepitan, a medal-winner for Britain at the Athens Paralympics last year, steered his wheelchair to the centre of the stage. “What chance would I have had in Nazi Germany, being disabled and black?” It was one eloquence among many yesterday, yet words alone cannot convey the enormity of the Holocaust. It requires music. The hall was filled with the sound of the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and the choir of Clare College, Cambridge, performing a new oratorio by James Whitbourn based on the Diary of Anne Frank, the Jewish girl whose family went into hiding in Amsterdam and who came to symbolise all children who perished in the camps. The libretto is based on several of Anne’s entries, including: “I see the world being slowly turned into wilderness. I hear the approaching thunder.”

The music was intensely sorrowful, as was Natalie Clein’s rendering on the cello of Ernest Bloch’s Scenes From Jewish Life. The notes which rose on the still air to the hall’s great hammerbeam room seemed to have sprung from a bottomless well of sorrow.

It cannot be mere coincidence that so many of the world’s greatest violinists are, or have been, Jewish.

Explore World News

• Iraq News

• US & Americas News

• Europe News

• Middle East News

• Asia News

• Africa News

• Ireland News

Times Recommends

• The truth behind Obama's meteoric ascent
• Christians flee Iraq amid religious cleansing
• Aid agencies: 5m face starvation in Zimbabwe