Approximately 1.5 million people died in Auschwitz.

My grandmother was on a train to Auschwitz, the death camp.

And so when she came out of Auschwitz, she made a vow.

I learned this from a woman who survived Auschwitz, one of the rare survivors.

The historic and moral responsibility for Auschwitz has left an indelible mark on us.

We are still left with a God who can do the tsunami and allow Auschwitz.

Today we are commemorating the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz Birkenau concentration camp.

Auschwitz was a complex consisting of a concentration, extermination and forced labour camp and 39 subcamps.

She went to Auschwitz when she was 15 years old, and her brother was eight, and the parents were lost.

Auschwitz was the most horrific expression of a system blinded by racial insanity which brought untold suffering upon the people.

The occupants changed the name of the city of Oświęcim to Auschwitz, which became the name of the camp as well.

Auschwitz will forever be engraved in the history of humanity as a symbol of utter contempt for humanity and of genocide.

My mother was a Czechoslovak Jew who was deported to Auschwitz by the same Nazi regime that once occupied my ambassadorial home.

British forces liberated Bergen Belsen and Neuengamme, while Soviet forces liberated Auschwitz in Poland and the Sachsenhausen and Ravensburg camps in Germany.

Those two statements were from the Ambassadors of Poland and Germany, who spoke on the occasion of the liberation of Auschwitz camp.

Though it was only one death camp among many, Auschwitz has become for the world a symbol of terror, genocide and the Holocaust.

Let me say that whatever the new threats to humanity, we must learn the lesson of Auschwitz and be brave enough to act.

The majority of the Jewish men, women and children deported to Auschwitz were sent to death in the Birkenau gas chambers immediately after arrival.

And she told me this, she said, We were in the train going to Auschwitz, and I looked down and saw my brother's shoes were missing.

The names of the camps Auschwitz Birkenau, Belzec, Chelmno on the Ner, Majdanek, Sobibor, Treblinka, Dachau will forever bring to our mind the darkest side of human nature.

A few months ago, I participated in the March of the Living at Auschwitz. Many Jews with European roots who now live in America or Israel were in attendance.

There are also young people among them those who should transmit the message to future generations about what happened in the concentration camp, gas chambers and crematoria in Auschwitz Birkenau.

Samuel Pisar, an Auschwitz survivor, said, and I'll quote him, The Holocaust teaches us that nature, even in its cruelest moments, is benign in comparison with man, when he loses his moral compass and his reason.

She told me this. She said, I walked out of Auschwitz into life and I made a vow. And the vow was, I will never say anything that couldn't stand as the last thing I ever say.

So what he did was to teach us Jewish Holocaust history, and so huddled around books with photographs of people in Auschwitz, I learned the melancholic history of my people through the melancholic history of another people.

Images like this, from the Auschwitz concentration camp, have been seared into our consciousness during the twentieth century and have given us a new understanding of who we are, where we've come from and the times we live in.

But Germany also appears to be increasingly uneasy about having to continue supporting Israel even when its policies are clearly reproachable. Seventy years after the liberation of Auschwitz, can the bilateral relationship withstand the rising tide of anti Israel sentiment in Europe?

Today in Oświęcim we hear the voice of political leaders as well as those who survived Auschwitz and other camps in Europe occupied by the Nazis let us never forget, let future generations never forget about the genocide that occurred 60 years ago .

And they shelved the project. And it sat there for 10 years, and then one day Abe Spiegel from Los Angeles, who had lost his three year old son at Auschwitz, came, saw the model, wrote the check and it got built 10 years later.

This week, as was clear from the statements that have been made by Poland and Germany, we mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz and the many other camps that fell to the Allied forces in the winter and spring of 1945.

Indeed, Israel s critics in Europe are indulging in a frivolous banalization when they compare the recent Gaza conflict or the battle of Jenin in 2002 with its 58 casualties among Palestinian combatants (Israel lost 25 soldiers) to Auschwitz, a death factory where 30,000 Jews were slaughtered daily.

January 27 is the day we remember the Holocaust, through the commemoration of the liberation of Auschwitz. In a few days, there will be ceremonies to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the revision of Captain Alfred Dreyfus s conviction on charges of espionage in a trial that tore the country apart.

Of course, Germany s eagerness to discharge the burden of history is not new. Back in 1998, the renowned intellectual Martin Walser publicly attacked the pervasiveness of Auschwitz in Germany s remembrance culture, declaring that the Holocaust had become a moral cudgel with which to intimidate all Germans and keep them in a perpetual state of guilt.

A chorus sang Romanian and Jewish songs and everybody expressed the vow that Vadim would be the next and the first Christian President of Romania, the yarmulke notwithstanding! Next, Tudor headed a PRM delegation to lay a wreath at Auschwitz, where the one time Holocaust denier declared that Jews had been exterminated in Romania.

Such hyperbole must be firmly rejected, for it offends the memory of those who suffered as a result of Vichy France s collaboration with Nazi Germany. After the Gestapo arrested my father in Nice in 1943, he was escorted by French gendarmes to the transit camp at Drancy, in the Paris suburbs, before being deported to Auschwitz.

As Tom Lantos, a Democratic US Congressman from California, put it, the move to lift the ban on arms exports to China clearly shows that the EU has lost its moral compass. Lantos knows about moral compasses as a boy, he was rescued by Raoul Wallenberg from being deported to Auschwitz by the Nazis in Budapest.

Historians of Europe will probably one day conclude that it is the Holocaust and Europe s relations with its Jews that paved the way for the opening of this process of repentance. In the words of the Polish historian and statesman Bronislaw Geremek, the liberation of Auschwitz on January 27, 1945, has to be seen as one of the founding moments of today s Europe.

It is estimated that among the 1.6 million people brought to Auschwitz, there were at least 1,100,000 Jews from all the countries of occupied Europe, over 140,000 Poles (mostly intellectuals and political prisoners, but also people caught in random manhunts in the streets of Polish towns), approximately 20,000 Roma from several European countries, over 15,000 Soviet prisoners of war, and thousands of prisoners of other nationalities.

The liberation of Auschwitz Birkenau (Oświęcim) on 27 January 1945, 60 years ago to the day, and all the many other concentration and extermination camps, gives me reason to commemorate the millions of victims innocent men, women and children of the Nazi genocide against Jews first and foremost, but also Sinti and Roma, homosexuals, the handicapped, prisoners of war, dissidents and many others from all across Europe.