Hello and welcome to Newsour with Rebecca Kesbby in London and me, Tim Franks, in southern Poland.

I'm at Auschwitz, the concentration camp, which became a slave labour camp, which became perhaps the most notorious death factory in human history. Today has been the 80th anniversary

of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops. The Nazis murdered almost a million Jews on

this site. Jews were not the only victims here, but they were the overwhelming number in the Nazi

campaign to wipe out an entire

people. During that all-consuming fire, the Holocaust, 6 million Jews were killed 40% of the global

population. The enormity of the crime can defy comprehension, and the legacy of Auschwitz, our understanding

of anti-Semitism, of genocide, of how we can allow the most terrible crime still to happen,

that remains fiercely contested.

It was for that reason at the ceremony which took place as this cold winter's day in Poland

turned to night.

It was the voices of the ever fewer number of survivors,

those now in their 80s and 90s who somehow made it out alive.

It was their voices which predominated.

The visiting dignitaries, the presidents of France, Germany and Ukraine,

the King of Britain, among them.

For them, their role was just to sit and to listen, maybe for the last time.

You'll hear one of the Survivor's stories, an interview I've done, with an astonishing 95-year-old later in the program.

First, though, a flavour of the commemorations here at Auschwitz.

Along with the speeches was music composed by those incarcerated here, killed here.

James Simone was a German Jew who had emigrated with his family to Amsterdam. There he was

interned and then deported. He was murdered at Auschwitz, whisked straight from the train to the

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