Victims join Queen, Blair to mark Holocaust Day in Britain

Survivors of Auschwitz death camp Thursday joined British Queen Elizabeth II and British Prime Minister Tony Blair at a service in London to mark the 60th anniversary of its liberation.

The event for 600 survivors and veterans could well be the lastmajor commemoration as many are elderly, according to a BBC report.

The prime minister said that Holocaust victims must not be forgotten.

"We must never dishonor their memory by allowing the ugly poison of racial prejudice and hatred to hold sway again," he saidat Westminster Hall in the Houses of Parliament.

He described the death inflicted by the Nazis as "an industry, not just the destruction of human life, but of human essence, donewith a barbarity we can scarcely contemplate."

"This was no natural disaster, no act of God, but an act of deliberate, calculated evil such as humanity never in its existence knew before, and let us pray, never knows again," he told those gathered at the hall.

The Queen lit the first of 60 candles in Westminster Hall.

Also at the ceremony, grandchildren of the survivors read out the names of 3,000 of their relatives who died at the hands of the Nazis.

Earlier, the Queen and Prince Philip spent more than an hour talking to survivors and veterans at a private reception at St. James' Palace, among them Martha Grunwald, who turned 85 Thursday.

Grunwald was 25 when she spent four months in Auschwitz, and lost three family members in the camp, including her mother.

Altogether some 15 million civilians are thought to have been murdered by the Nazi regime, some six million of whom were Jewish.

Source: Xinhua