WARSAW (AFP)---Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu honoured Holocaust victims at a war memorial in the Polish capital Tuesday, the eve of the 65th anniversary of the Auschwitz death camp's liberation.
The Israeli leader bowed his head in front of the imposing grey marble "Umschlagplatz" (collection point) memorial in central Warsaw, laying a wreath draped in a banner in the blue and white colours of the Israeli flag.
With him were Holocaust survivors and a Polish woman whom Israel has honoured as "Righteous among the Nations" -- a title it awards to non-Jews who risked their lives to save Jews.
"At this place from where hundreds of thousands of our people were sent to death camps and where we meet today the Righteous Among the Nations, we encounter the worst evil in the history of mankind together with the greatest courage in the history of humanity," Netanyahu told reporters.
It was from the infamous "Umschlagplatz" site that in 1942 Warsaw's WWII Nazi German occupiers sent more than 300,000 Jews by train to the notorious Treblinka death camp, 100 kilometres (60 miles) northeast of the city.
"This is not an easy encounter but it gives us hope and direction for our future. May God avenge the victims," said the Israeli leader standing alongside his wife Sara whose father was the only member of his family to survive the Holocaust in which some six million Jews were murdered
Netanyahu later visited the city's 1944 Warsaw Uprising museum where he honoured victims of the bloody and doomed revolt by Polish partisans against the Nazi occupiers.
The uprising came over a year after Jewish resistance fighters led an equally doomed revolt in the Warsaw ghetto against the Nazis in 1943.
Netanyahu wrote in Hebrew in the museum's guestbook: "The people of Israel have learnt their lesson."
On the eve of the trip to Poland, Netanyahu had warned that Jews were again facing calls for their extermination, in an apparent reference to Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.
"There is evil in the world. If it is unstopped, it expands, and it is expanding. And it is threatening the same people, the Jewish people, but we know it only starts with the Jewish people," Netanyahu said on Monday.
'New call for the extermination of the Jews'
"There is a new call for the extermination of the Jewish people," he said at the opening of an exhibition of the Auschwitz blueprints at the Yad Vashem holocaust memorial in Jerusalem.
Ahmadinejad has repeatedly said the Jewish state was doomed to be "wiped off the map" and has questioned the scale of the Holocaust. Israel considersIran to be an "existential threat".
Earlier Tuesday Netanyahu met with Polish Foreign Minister Radoslaw Sikorski.
A senior Israeli official told reporters the talks had focused on the Middle East peace process, international efforts to halt Iran's nuclear programme and "ways to impose effective sanctions on Tehran"
They also discussed bilateral and trade relations, including the sale of Israeli drones to the Polish army, said the official, who requested anonymity.
Netanyahu later met President Lech Kaczynski and his Polish counterpart, Donald Tusk.
Referring to the bone-chilling temperatures outside, Netanyahu said at a joint press conference with Tusk that "there is no winter in our relations, there is a lot of sunshine".
"Poland is trying to positively and effectively contribute to the peace process in the Middle East," Tusk said. He also underscored "warmth" in bilateral relations.
Both agreed to annual ministerial meetings chaired by their Prime Ministers and to upgrade military and economic cooperation.
"We believe that there is a great future for our two peoples -- the future is ours to seize," Netanyahu said.
On Wednesday he is due to visit the former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp for a ceremony marking International Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 65th anniversary of the liberation of the camp where some 1.1 million Jews perished between June 1940 and January 1945.