Former Israeli premier Shimon Peres is to take part in an annual tribute to Holocaust victims at the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp in southern Poland, the Israeli embassy in Warsaw said Friday.

Peres, a winner of the 1994 Nobel Peace Prize and number two in Israeli prime minister-designate Ehud Olmert’s Kadima party, "will take part in the March of the Living for the first time on Tuesday," Israeli embassy spokesman Michal Sobelman told Agence France Presse.

Some 8,000 people are expected to walk the three kilometres between the former Auschwitz camp and Birkenau in memory of Holocaust victims.

The Nazis, who occupied Poland from 1939 to 1945, built the death camp in 1940 on the site of a former Polish army barracks on the outskirts of the southern Polish town of Oswiecim -- Auschwitz in German.

The camp was expanded later to the nearby village of Birkenau. At least 1.1 million men, women and children perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau during WWII. Most of them were among the six million European Jews exterminated in the Nazis’ "Final Solution."

After arriving in Poland Sunday evening, Peres is to travel to Plonsk, a village 60 kilometres northwest of Warsaw, birthplace in 1886 of
David Ben Gurion, who became the first prime minister of the independent state of Israel after WWII.

Peres will be received by President Lech Kaczynski during his trip to
Poland.