World leaders urged today that the horrors and lessons of the Holocaust never be forgotten as they marked the liberation exactly 60 years ago of the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz where a million and a half people were killed.

A train whistle and the sharp sound of brakes marked the start of the 100-minute ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland where Jews, political prisoners and gypsies arrived in cattle trucks to an almost certain death.

Amid falling snow and sub-zero temperatures, some 10,000 people, including about 1,000 survivors, many wearing their prisoners' armbands and with their camp numbers still tattooed on their forearms, gathered to pay tribute at the solemn ceremony to those who died at Auschwitz between 1940 and 1945.

Towers bearing a series of flames burned brightly behind the memorial cross as snow fell, blanketing the site.

Anatoly Shapiro, the 92-year-old commander of the Red Army battalion that liberated the camp on January 27, 1945, said in a videotaped message from his home in New York: "This must never be allowed to happen again, anywhere."

Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, Auschwitz prisoner number 4427 and a former Polish foreign minister, gave a moving address on behalf of Poles, the first prisoners of the most notorious of Nazi death camps.

"Back in September 1940 when I first stood on the assembly ground in Auschwitz, in the crowd of five and a half thousand other Poles, I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II," said Mr Bartoszewski, now 82.

"In the first 15 months of existence of this awful place, we, he Polish inmates, were all alone. The free world was not interested in our suffering or in our death."

His address was followed by speeches from former prisoners, including Simone Veil, a former European Parliament president, who made an emotional appeal for world unity against racism and anti-Semitism. Of the six million Jews who died in the Holocaust, more than a million perished at Auschwitz.

"Today, 60 years after, a new commitment must be made so that men unite at least to fight against hatred of the other, against anti-Semitism, against racism, against intolerance," she said.

"The wish we all have so often expressed for 'never again' has not been heeded since other genocides have been perpetrated."

Forty-four world leaders attended the ceremony, including President Katsav of Israel, President Kohler of Germany, President Putin of Russia, President Chirac of France and Dick Cheney, the US Vice-President.

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