Survivors recall liberation of Auschwitz

Dozens of people who lived near Auschwitz and risked their lives to help inmates at the Nazi death camp were honored Saturday on the 62nd anniversary of the camp‘s liberation.

"World public opinion has often held that the residents of the area were completely indifferent to the fate of the prisoners," Kaczynski said in the letter, which denounced "such unjust statements."

Nazi Germany set up Auschwitz after occupying Poland, at first mostly imprisoning political prisoners. However, it was later expanded into a complex where as many as 1.5 million people were murdered, most of them Jews, but also Gypsies, Roman Catholics who opposed the Nazi regime, homosexuals and others.

Also Saturday, politicians and survivors gathered at the former Buchenwald concentration camp in eastern Germany to remember the victims, marking what the U.N. has established as an annual day of Holocaust remembrance.

British Prime Minister Tony Blair said in a statement that the day "underlines both our duty to remember the horrors of the past and the responsibility of each of us to shape the future so they are never repeated."