WHEN Halina Birenbaum left Auschwitz as a teenager, she was wearing a bulky man’s jacket, a woollen skirt and patched- up trousers.

Mrs Birenbaum returned to Auschwitz yesterday, sat next to the crematorium which had claimed so many of her friends and relatives and swaddled herself in a borrowed sleeping bag. “I look like an Eskimo but it would have been absurd to freeze to death on a day like this,” the 74-year-old Polish Jewish poet said. She escaped the gas chambers several times.

Her red letter day was the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, site of the biggest mass murder in history. Snow and a chill wind licked round the empty wooden barrack room, sending the 30 presidents and princes scurrying for their limousines after the cantor sounded the shofar call to end the formal ceremonies. The shofar is a horn blown to scare the enemies of Israel.

“Let us remember that we are on the site of the most gigantic cemetery in the world, a cemetery where there are no graves, no stones, but where the ashes of more than one million people lie,” Waldemar Dabrowski, the Polish Culture Minister, said as he opened the ceremony.

“Today, 60 years on, we still cannot comprehend how and why, in the 20th century, the world was able to remain silent about the Holocaust,” President Katsav of the Israel said.

“It’s here, where absolute evil was perpetrated, that the will must resurface for a fraternal world, a world based on respect of man and his dignity,” Simone Veil, a former Euro-pean Parliament President and survivor of Auschwitz, said.

“I still weep when I think about them and I will never be able to forget them,” she said of the 1.1 million who did not survive Auschwitz.

President Chirac of France acknowledged his country’s responsibility for what happened: “Your memory, of the world that was, is for France more than painful. It is (for France) a guilty conscience. It bears the weight of responsibility.”

Other leaders used their speeches in front of a stark stone memorial to those who died to plead against the revival of anti-Semitism in Europe — and at least two urged the world to resist terrorism.

The Nazi attempt to exterminate the Jewish people had for ever darkened the history of mankind and left a “shadow on the history of Europe”, the Pope said in a message.

“There must be no yielding to ideologies which justify contempt for human dignity on the basis of race, colour, language or religion,” he said. “I make this appeal to everyone, and particularly to those who would resort, in the name of religion, to acts of oppression and terrorism.”

President Putin of Russia took that papal admonition a step further, with a thinly veiled reference to Chechen separatists. “Terrorism is no less dangerous and cunning than fascism,” the Russian leader, awarded a keynote speech because the Soviet Army liberated Auschwitz in January 1945, said. “Terrorism is as cruel as fascism — it has already claimed thousands of innocent lives.”

The leaders prayed, heard the kaddish — the Jewish prayer for the dead, incanted in what is in effect the world’s largest Jewish cemetery — and lit candles that illuminated the frozen gloom that had settled on Auschwitz.

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