Auschwitz survivors, Soviet veterans and leaders including Israeli Premier Benjamin
Netanyahu gathered on Wednesday for US President Barack Obama spoke of the "sacred duty to remember the cruelty" of Auschwitz and of "resisting anti-Semitism and ignorance in all its forms" in a video address aired at a forum organised by the European Jewish Congress (EJC) in Krakow, southern Poland, ahead of official afternoon ceremonies at the Auschwitz site.
"Auschwitz is the symbol of absolute evil that remains seared on the human conscience," French President Nicolas Sarkozy wrote in a message to Polish and European Jewish leaders at the Krakow forum and underscored France's commitment to preserve the memory of the Holocaust.
"Like people, historical memory can disappear," EJC leader Moshe Kantor warned in a speech to some 700 participants in the "Let My People Live" forum.
"Our appreciation to you is timeless," he said, thanking Soviet Red Army veterans who liberated Auschwitz on January 27, 1945.
Speaking after landing in Krakow on his way to the ceremonies, Netanyahu said, "The tragedy of the Jewish people had been that it was unable to identify danger in time and to defend itself.
"This situation has totally changed over the past 65 years. I am coming today as the prime minister of Israel. We are a nation that can defend itself and a nation capable of warming the rest of the world of danger,"
Netanyahu was to deliver a speech later Wednesday at the Auschwitz ceremony, due to start around 3 pm (1400 GMT), speaking after survivors and Poland's President Lech Kaczynski.
Tel Aviv's Polish-born Chief Rabbi Israel Meir Lau, a Holocaust orphan who survived as a child in Nazi camps, was to recite the Kaddish, or Jewish prayer of mourning.
Poland invited Russian President Dmitry Medvedev to attend, but he declined citing "other obligations", according to Warsaw.
The former Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp has become an enduring reminder of Nazi German genocide during World War II which claimed the lives of six million European Jews.
In 2005 the United Nations declared January 27 International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
A total of 1.1 million people perished at Auschwitz-Birkenau -- one million of them Jews from across occupied Europe -- mostly killed in gas chambers but also from shooting, hanging, starvation, disease, slave labour and pseudo-medical experiments.
Lithuanian-born Holocaust survivor and Tel Aviv resident Baruch Shub, 85, said he still bore the emotional scars of his suffering.
"There's a lot of sorrow, because when I came home, I found nobody in my family alive. But also a bit of happiness because the war was over and I'd somehow stayed alive," Shub told AFP.
The Nazis initially set up Auschwitz to hold Polish political prisoners in 1940, a year after invading Poland. They chose a former barracks in the southern town of Oswiecim, Germanised as Auschwitz.
It became a site primarily for exterminating Jews -- viewed by the Nazis as sub-human -- from 1942 as it expanded to Birkenau, three kilometres (two miles) away.
In addition to Jews, and 70-75,000 non-Jewish Poles, the Nazis killed 21,000 Roma there, 15,000 Soviet POWs and 10-15,000 others, including resistance members arrested across Europe, according to the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum.
There were only around 7,000 survivors in the camp at the liberation. The Nazis had evacuated some 60,000 others only days earlier in the notorious "Death March" as they fled the Soviet advance.
With their numbers dwindling year by year, about 100 survivors were set to attend Wednesday's ceremony in sub-zero temperatures similar to the weather 65 years ago.
Only a handful of the liberators are still alive. Two, Ivan Martynushkin, 86, and Yakov Vinnochenko, 83, were scheduled to attend.
In Krakow, Martynushkin told AFP he was marked by that fateful day.
"We started meeting huddles of people. They came towards us, in prison stripes. Some had covers over their heads. We could only see their eyes. And in those eyes, we could see what they were feeling," he said.
"But we didn't know what it was. We only understood after the war," he added.
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