Belgian Prime Minister Guy Verhofstadt on Sunday paid homage to the victims of the Holocaust as he inaugurated the renovated Belgian pavilion and opened an exhibition dedicated to Belgian citizens deported to the Auschwitz-Birkenau concentration camp in Poland.

Nazism was "a regime characterised by hatred, nationalism and racism", which at Auschwitz "crossed all boundaries and wiped out all traces of civilisation", Verhofstadt said.

"We are here as witnesses to the truth, as witnesses to history. Every story of the Holocaust must be told, every detail preserved, every fact unveiled. We owe it to the victims, both to the dead and to the survivors," he said during a ceremony attended by former prisoners and by Poland’s culture minister, Kazimierz Ujadowski.

The Belgian prime minister visited the museum at Auschwitz, where he saw an exhibition of the victims’ personal belongings, as well as "death block" number 11 and the four crematoriums.

Verhofstadt was accompanied by his wife and two children.

Following repeated Jewish complaints, Belgium’s government had agreed last year to fund the renovation and modernization of the country’s memorial located in Auschwitz Bloc 20. 

The prime minister decided to ask a specialist in museography to prepare a concrete plan of the financial needs for the modernization.

The Belgian army’s civil engineering section was helpful in the restoration works.

The Nazis deported around 25,000 Belgian Jews to Auschwitz during WWII, just 1,335 of whom survived. The first convoy from Belgium was taken in August 1942 from the Mechelen military barrack.

Half of Belgian Jews died during World War II.

Between 1940 and 1945, around 1.1 million men, women and children, most of them Jews from German-occupied countries around Europe, died at Auschwitz-Birkenau.