Return to Auschwitz

Today the world stopped and remembered. At Auschwitz, where world leaders gathered to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi concentration camp, an old man walks through the gates with his family and remembers too.

Like all the other Jews who were at Auschwitz, he has a tattoo on his arm, a number - 161421 - that serves as a permanent reminder of the genocide.

Bob Obuscovski, from Ilford, also has his own memories of Auschwitz.

To the world it is where more than a million Jews died, the place where the Nazis perfected killing as an industry and set about putting the "Final Solution of the Jewish Question" into practice.

To Mr Obuscovski, 76, it was where every single member of his family died, and only he lived. "I really didn't want to come back," said Mr Obuscovski. "But it's important that we do this. People must never forget what happened here. In the end, I was just a skeleton in a ragged, stripy uniform. I was the only one in my family to survive."

In all some 1.2 million people - gypsies, homosexuals, political prisoners and Russian prisoners of war as well as Jews - died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.

There Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and the Earl of Wessex joined 29 world leaders - including Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israel's President Moshe Katsav and US Vice-President Dick Cheney - to pay their respects at a ceremony to mark the 60th anniversary of the death factory's liberation by Soviet troops.

Together with camp survivors and the former soldiers of the Russian Red Army who walked into the camp that day, they lit candles and prayed.

Auschwitz is a museum now, a shrine to all those men, women and children who came by cattle truck and were methodically murdered in the gas chambers.

But the survivors who were there today - a dwindling band - were a living museum, sharing their memories of what should never be forgotten.

Mr Obuscovski does his best to keep the memory alive.

"I speak at schools to tell the younger generations about the Holocaust," said Polish-born Mr Obuscovski who came to Britain at the end of the war as an orphan. "It's not easy. I get tears in my eyes and I get sleepless nights.

"But it does help me - I break down and have a good cry."

Visitors without such painful memories have to grope for an understanding of the enormity of the evil that took place.

There are remnants of the lives extinguished. In some of the remaining huts that once housed prisoners unknowingly awaiting extermination, are personal effects looted from the men, women and children in the camp.

There are huge piles of spectacles, worn shoes and frayed toothbrushes. In another hut, hundreds of battered suitcases in which the Jews of Europe's ghettos had packed a few belongings before being herded onto cattle trucks.

Outside the huts the camp is still. Leaden skies hang over the site. Auschwitz is neat and orderly, serried rows of huts behind barbed wire.

But at the huge Birkenau camp nearby all that is left is emptiness and desolation, save for the ruins of the gas chambers, blown up by the Nazis in a bid to erase evidence of their deeds.

Ziggi Shipper, from Stanmore, took his 16-year-old grandson Elliott Stern with him to see Auschwitz.

"Everyone should see this and no one should forget what happened," said Elliot, from Radlett, Hertfordshire. Mr Zigger relived his days at the camp: "When we arrived here in August 1944, we didn't know where we were.

"There was an orchestra playing when we were getting off the train - the musicians were all dressed in stripy uniforms.

"We had been packed into cattle trucks like sardines. It was suffocating - people died and we used the dead bodies as pillows."

Polish-born Mr Shipper, 75, was among Jews transported from the ghetto in Lodz, Poland's second biggest city.

"There was a funny smell and a haze but we didn't know why until a Sonderkommando told us about the gas chambers and furnaces.

"Women and children were being taken to the left and the men and teenage boys to the right. Those to the left were taken straight to the gas chambers.

"Some women could have saved themselves but refused to leave their children and went to their deaths with them.

"There were rows and rows of little children holding hands. Within an hour of arriving, they were dead. To say the Nazis behaved like animals is an insult to animals - animals only kill to eat."

Even today the sights of Auschwitz have the power to stop him in his tracks. Mr Shipper, who came to England in 1946 and later established a printing and stationery business, said the sight of inmates' belongings displayed at the Auschwitz Museum upset him.

"I just can't cope with it," he said. "But the greatest thing is to have my grandson here with me.

"Hitler and the Nazis did not succeed. If I can stand here in Auschwitz today with my grandson, then I can believe in miracles."

In London there will be events to remember the six million Jews murdered by the Nazis. The Queen, Prime Minister Tony Blair and religious leaders are to be joined by more than 600 victims at a special ceremony at Westminster Hall.