Sixty-one years after the liberation of the Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, the grimmest symbol of the murder of six million Jews in WWII, ceremonies across Europe marked the first international Holocaust remembrance day Friday and over the weekend.

The commemorations came amid a storm provoked by an Iranian plan to stage a conference
questioning the Holocaust, which Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad has described as a "myth".

At the site of the Auschwitz-Birkenau camp in southern Poland, the largest built by the Nazis, Polish Prime Minister Kazimierz Marcinkiewicz presided over ceremonies attended by camp survivors and the Jewish community.

Marcinkiewicz said it was impossible to be indifferent to the horrors of the Holocaust.

“The Nazis’ Auschwitz camp is the biggest cemetery in Europe that has no tombs. It’s all the more important to preserve the memory of what happened here ... as a warning for a world still full of hate and aggression,” he said.

Historians estimate around 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews from Germany and Nazi-occupied countries, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau between 1940 and 1945.

UN stance

Earlier Friday during a visit to Switzerland, United Nations chief Kofi Annan denounced those who deny the mass murders committed by German dictator Adolf Hitler’s Nazi regime, a reference to Iranian president’s recent comments.

Last November the UN General Assembly declared January 27 its official memorial day for the Holocaust.

In Berlin, the speaker of the lower house of parliament, Norbert Lammert, said recent statements from Iran’s Ahmadinejad denying the Holocaust showed the need to recall terrible crimes.

The solemn service in the Bundestag was accompanied by other events in Germany and across Europe.

In United Kingdom, Holocaust survivors and victims of genocide took part in various events across the country. The year’s annual event, which took place in presence of prime minister Tony Blair, was hosted in Cardiff, Wales, by the Cardiff Council, the Welsh Assembly and the Holocaust Memorial Day Trust, on the theme of “One person can make a difference”.

One unusual act of remembrance took place in the Polish capital Warsaw Friday, where an empty tramcar bearing the Star of David in place of a number rolled through the streets.

The tram was identical to those that in the 1940s travelled through the Warsaw ghetto, which was created then annihilated by the Nazi occupiers.

Meanwhile, Poland’s powerful Roman Catholic Church called on believers to light candles in their windows Friday afternoon in memory of those who perished in the Holocaust. Special appeals to the faithful were made by Cardinal Jozef Glemp, the Primate of Poland, and the archbishop of Krakow, Stanislaw Dziwisz.

France, Estonia, Russia commemorate

In France, ceremonies were held in the Rivesaltes and Milles confinement camps, in synagogues and in schools where children decorated commemorative plaques with flowers.

In Estonia, invaded by German troops in 1941, the government issued a statement expressing regret that some Estonians collaborated with the Nazi occupiers in perpetrating crimes against humanity as policemen or camp guards.

“There is no justification whatsoever for the participation of any person in those shameful and morally condemnable acts,” the statement said.

In Lithuania, the ambassadors of Britain, Germany, Poland, Russia, the United States and other officials gathered at a memorial at Paneriai, close to the capital Vilnius, to listen to prayers.

Paneriai was the site of a Nazi death camp where some 100,000 people, mainly Jews, were killed between 1941 and 1943.

In Belgrade, where 5,000 Jews and Roma died in a concentration camp, Serbian Prime Minister Vojislav Kostunica opened a monument to the memory of victims.

"We must fight against all types of intolerance, against racial, religious or national segregation and all sorts of exclusion," he said.

In Italy, a ceremony presided by Foreign Minister Gianfranco Fini marked the publication of a book about some 400 Italians who saved Jews from 1943 to 1945 during Nazi occupation.

Russia’s Chief Rabbi Berel Lazar performed a remembrance prayer at a commemoration event at the Moscow Writers’ House, urging leaders worldwide to do more to promote tolerance.

Lazar lamented that extremist sentiments were gaining popularity around the world including Russia, where a knife attack earlier this month on worshippers at a Moscow synagogue left eight people wounded.

"Preachers of extremist views must once and for all be excluded from the political and social life of the country," Lazar said.

Speaking to the press, human rights groups said Friday Russia is becoming a haven for international Holocaust deniers and anti-Semites.

Council of Europe chief Terry Davis warned that "61 years after the liberation of Auschwitz, Europe is not yet free of racism, anti-Semitism, prejudice against Roma or homophobia.

"If anything, it has added new forms of intolerance such as Islamophobia to this shameful list."

"We need deeds, not words" to fight discrimination, the secretary general of the democracy and rights body added.

Sweden, Croatia and Belgium

In Sweden, the Jewish community together with the Central Council for Survivors of the Holocaust and the Swedish committee against anti-Semitism hosted a ceremony in the great synagogue of Stockholm. A ceremony was also held at Raoul Wallenberg square in presence of Crown princess Victoria of Sweden, representatives of the government and Holocaust survivors.

Croatia’s President Stipe Mesic said at a ceremony that young students should be taught about the Holocaust to ensure peace for future generations.

He reiterated criticism that Croatian schoolbooks virtually ignored the Holocaust and condemned public displays by nationalistic teenagers of symbols of Croatia’s wartime pro-Nazi Ustasha regime, under which thousands of Jews, Roma, Serbs and anti-fascist Croatians were killed in concentration camps.

In Madrid, a memorial ceremony was presided by King Juan Carlos I and Queen Sofia of Spain and prime minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero, in presence of European Jewish Congress President Pierre Besnainou.

In Brussels, during an official ceremony organized by Belgian’s current presidency of the Organisation for cooperation and security in Europe (OSCE), ambassador Christian Strohal, director of the OSCE office for democratic institutions and human rights, recalled the words of Nobel peace prize winner Elie Wiesel “Not to transmit an experience is to betray it.”

25,000 Jews from Belgium were deported to Auschwitz during WWII, including 5,000 children. Only 1,207 survived. 

In his speech, Natan Ramet, a survivor of Auschwitz and Dachau death camps, declared that "the existence of other genocides may not lead to the banalization of the Judeocide." His remarks came amid arguing in Belgium around the fact that the Jewish museum of deportation and resistance should also draw attention to other genocides and breaches of human rights.

Ceremonies also took place in the Czech Republic, Finland, Norway, Holland and the Greek northern city of Thessaloniki, whose thriving Jewish community was wiped out.