BIRKENAU, Poland - Under a steady spring rain, some 20,000 people from around the world filed in a slow stream of humanity along the road to the killing fields of Birkenau Thursday to take part in a ceremony to remember the millions who died in the Holocaust.
As a narrator intoned the names of the victims of the most infamous of the Nazi death camps set up on Polish soil, participants in the 18th March of the Living -- the biggest in the event`s history on the 60th anniversary of the end of World War II -- filed past Birkenau`s grimly notorious watch tower and into the sprawl of green fields and spartan barracks.
The train track that enters the camp under the watch tower was lined with wooden plaques left by the marchers, inscribed with messages in languages from Hebrew to Spanish, French, German, Latvian and Hungarian.
"My God, My God, who have you forsaken us?" read one of the plaques in English.
"Against war and violence, for peace and friendship," Voelker, a German, had written.
"How we love living," someone had written in Spanish, while one plaque bore the simple message, "I`m here."
Roni Rabiner-Feffer, 26, one of a group of students fron Be`er Sheva in Israel told AFP as she crossed the bridge near the train station at Oswiecim -- the town which gave its Germanicised name to Auschwitz -- heading onto the final few hundred metres to Birkenau, that the march conveyed that simple message to the world.
"I don`t like to use the word `prove`, but the message of the march is `Here we are, and we`re alive," she said.
"For us, there is a sense of pride in this march and it`s in memory of our families, our people," she added.
"And for sure it is to say that this should never happen again to anyone."
Two hours after the hollow wail of the traditional Jewish shofar horn had cut through the damp air of the Auschwitz-Birkenau Nazi death camp, signalling the start of the march at 1:15 pm (1115 GMT), hundreds of people wearing the navy blue rain jackets of the event, many carrying Israel`s sky blue and white flag with the Star of David, still crowded the road to Birkenau.
There, they took part in a remembrance ceremony where Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon addressed officials and participants, describing the march as "an impressive and inspiring demonstration of solidarity and remembrance".
"With me are Holocaust survivors. Men and women who survived persecution, torture, mental and physical degradation; true heroes who experience the death marches, the deportations and searches, who survived ghettos, Auschwitz, Buchenwald... concentration and death camps whose monstrous names are carved in blood in the history of our people," the prime minister said.
Sharon arrived at noon in southern Poland with 20 Holocaust survivors and 20 of their grandchildren who are serving in the Israeli army.
"I had to come here to see where my people were murdered," an elderly woman from the southern US state of Florida told AFP before the march started. She stopped abruptly, her voice wracked by sobs.
"Now I see it and it`s horrible," she said, apologising for her tears.
Irene Zattfild, of Hungarian Jewish extraction, was taking part in her fifth March of the Living. She was interned at Auschwitz when she was 13 and lost her entire family here.
"I feel very, very lucky to have survived. I`m the only survivor in my family. Now I bring people here," she said, her face almost permanently creased in a smile.
"I love life, and I want to pass that message on to others," Irene said.
Hungary only began mass deportations of Jews late in the war, but once they began they were carried out with horrifying efficiency. Some 450,000 Hungarian Jews were killed at Auschwitz, nearly half the official death toll at the camp, where many deportees were sent to their deaths as soon as they arrived, packed like animals into cattle cars.
"We did not reach out to the victims, we were not strong enough," Hungarian Prime Minister Ferenc Gyurcsany said at a private ceremony for his country`s victims before the march.
"These atrocities were committed by no one other than us all, the human race," he said.
In Birkenau -- the German name for the village of Brzezinka, which the Germans emptied to be able to build an extension to Auschwitz in order to be able to kill Jews and other `Untermenschen` more efficiently -- participants visited the dark, cold barracks that stretch out, row after row, across grassy fields as they waited for everyone to arrive.
"This is a reunion of a whole nation and those people who died here," Eugenia Spector, a 19-year-old Ukrainian Jew from Odessa, told AFP.
Jurek Sternfeld, 66, was in a group of 160 Jewish people from around Australia.
Born in Warsaw, six months before Nazi Germany invaded Poland starting World War II, the most deadly conflict in history, he was smuggled out of Poland by his mother immediately after the start of the war.
His family spent the war in the Soviet Union, and survived the conflict intact -- a rarity for Polish Jews.
"I think this march is the right thing, as far as the future is concerned, to remember what happened. As far as I`m concerned this was the blackest point in the history of humankind. A whole group of people was deliberately being wiped out.
"This must not happen again and this is what motivates me to come here," he said.
A group of Roman Catholic school teachers from the United States was also among the marchers.
"The march is a chance for us to show that we remember and to be here on such a historical occasion -- the 60th anniversary of the end of the war," said Toby Harkleroad, a teacher from Washington DC.
"We`ll take the message back to our students and everyone we meet in our lives, to make sure we never forget and it never happens again.
"Especially as Catholics, we have to look back at the role we might have played in setting the world up for such a tragedy happening, what we did or did not do," he said.
Wartime Pope Pius XVI did not denounce the Nazi persecution of the Jews.
The Nazis exterminated six million European Jews, half of them from mainly Catholic Poland, home to Europe`s largest Jewish community before World War II. The March of the Living began in 1988 to counter voices denying that the Holocaust ever took place.

05/05/2005 15:02 GMT