Survivors and global leaders will be invited to light candles at the empty wooden train car, which sits on the tracks at Auschwitz.

The car carried people to the camps, and is regarded as a symbol of death.

Ronald S. Lauder, speaking on behalf of donors at the Memorial and Museum of Auschwitz-Birkenau, recalls a quote from Holocaust survivor Roman Kent, who died in 2021, who said: "We don't want our past to be our children's future."

Lauder, the president of the World Jewish Congress, says those words "haunt us today", adding that if Roman Kent was still alive "he would cry".

He addresses Hamas' attacks on 7 October 2023 on eastern Israel, when about 1,200 people were killed and 251 taken back to Gaza as hostages.

Lauder says the "common thread" with the horrors of Auschwitz is the "age-old hatred of Jews".

He warns the Holocaust was caused by the "step by step" of antisemitism, adding there are "parallels across the world".

"This is not 1933...this is 2025, the hatred of Jews has its willing supporters then and it has them now," he says.

Lauder adds: "It was the world's silence that led to Auschwitz" and calls on those to pledge to not remain silent in the face of antisemitism.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

There have been several powerful speeches in this ceremony: graphic accounts of what the survivors endured, followed by appeals for tolerance and combating antisemitism.

What is extraordinary is the array of heads of state listening to every word.

King Charles, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands rubbing shoulders with Auschwitz survivors, most of them in their 90s. Other heads of state, including Emmanuel Macron of France and German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, have all made passionate statements around today’s commemoration.

Steinmeier said that “memory has no closure, and responsibility does not either”.

But the words echoing in the shadow of Birkenau’s Death Gate belong to the dwindling number of survivors.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

Tova Friedman, who we heard from a little earlier, was one of the youngest survivors when Auschwitz was liberated 80 years ago – she was only six and a half, and yet saw horrors that no child should ever see.

She has lived much of her life in the US, and her powerful voice was the first in English in this ceremony.

Friedman was born only a year before the German invasion of Poland and yet remembers her mother’s advice never to look any of the Nazis in the eye.

“I wasn’t even sure what Jewish was,” she said.

She was only five when she and her mother were sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau, in her words a “very terrified” girl in a dark cattle car holding on to her mother’s hand.

Friedman still has nightmares of what she lived through and she warns of dark forces and rampant antisemitism spreading across the world.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

Now a sprightly 99, Leon Weintraub lives in Sweden, but like the survivors who spoke before him his life began in Poland.

His story is a reminder that just because the Nazis were defeated, antisemitism was present in Poland after the war as well as before it.

Weintraub was 13 when war broke out and his family was sent to the Lodz Ghetto.

He describes losing his job as a doctor in 1969 because of antisemitism and how he was forced to leave Poland to continue his work.

His appeal is to fight intolerance of all kinds and to “be vigilant” and to fight back against those who challenge democracy.

Turning to the commemorations today, Weintraub says Auschwitz symbolises unprecedented cruelty, where the techniques of mass and industrial mass murder were first introduced.

He speaks to divisions across the world today, and urges "all people of goodwill", and young people in particular, to be "sensitive to all expressions of intolerance and resentment to people who are different."

He adds that in the digital world, it is difficult to discern between people who take intolerant views seriously and those in pursuit of popularity, but warns there are consequences of not taking threats seriously.

"We the survivors, we understand the consequences," he says.

Weintraub then asks attendees to stand for a moment of reflection, during which another slideshow plays, accompanied by a music arrangement of Polish Jewish composer Szymon Laks.

Leon Weintraub says upon his arrival at Auschwitz-Birkenau: "We were stripped of all our humanity."

He says his mother and aunt were killed in a gas chamber.

After a few weeks he joined a group of prisoners who were selected to work outside of the camp, meaning he was able to leave illegally.

In 1945, after a three-day death march, he was transported to another camp. He was then liberated by French soldiers and hospitalised.

"I thought it was normal that you had to die...if you were a Jewish child you had to die. Death was a normal thought," Tova Friedman continues, as those listening remain silent as she shares her story.

"At that time," she continues, "we were victims in a moral vacuum."

She continues, claiming that Jewish-Christian values have been met with prejudice, fear, and rampant antisemitism. It is "shocking to all of us – our children, our grandchildren."

Israel – the only democracy in the middle east – is fighting to exist, Tova reminds the audience.

"We must all reawaken our collective conscience to transform this hatred that has so powerfully ripped our society."

With that, Tova ends her speech.

Tova Friedman continues, recalling the moment she and her mother were taken to the concentration camp.

"There were rows and rows of naked women around me", she described. "I too was naked and I tried to avoid the gleam of the German soldiers' teeth and eyes. I was their height so I could see them completely."

Friedman describes how she was "beaten mercilessly" for not being able to stand still and her mother "pleaded" for her not to cry.

"I recall thinking, I will never let them know how much they are hurting me. At 5 and a half, I had the rebellion in me," she says.

She continues to recall the horror of watching girls being taken to the gas chambers, "crying and shivering" as they walked barefoot in the snow. "They too became ashes," she says.

Tova Friedman, an 86-year-old Auschwitz survivor, takes her spot at the podium to speak.

Speaking in English, she says she considers 27 January her birthday, so much so that some of her friends "don't even know that I have a regular birthday because this is what counts".

She says that it is an honour to celebrate this day with so many people, and that she is here to represent the memories of the children who did not survive. Friedman also reminds the audience that "we are here to proclaim and pledge that we will never, never, ever allow history to repeat itself".

Friedman was six years old when she was liberated from Auschwitz. Recounting her journey there, she recalls watching from her hiding place in a labour camp as all of the children were rounded up "and sent to their deaths". The heart-breaking cries of parents fell on deaf ears, she says.

"I thought to myself, am I the only Jewish child left in the world?"

Shortly after, her family was rounded up onto cattle cars, where she and her mother were separated from her father and sent to Auschwitz. That was the only time she ever saw her father cry, she recalls.

"I held on tightly to my mother's hand in the dark cattle car for countless hours while the cries and prayers of so many desperate women permeated my soul and haunt me to this day."

Janina Iwanska continues, she says that Germans were given orders to "flatten" her hometown in the Polish capital, Warsaw, and that in the first six days of the 1944 uprising 50,000 people were killed.

Iwanska goes on to talk about a camp that was set up near Warsaw, and that on 12 August she was brought to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

Iwanska asks: "So what are we celebrating today?"

She responds saying we are celebrating liberation - when the camp stopped its operation.

When the camp was liberated, only 5-10% of the people were liberated, she says, adding that 100 thousand people were taken on a death march and to other camps.

Iwanska goes on to read a quote which says that the war finished in 1945 and people were in euphoria. "Never again, was the slogan".

She notes that some people believed the war would never happen again but that there were others who predicted it might repeat because "people have become so inhuman".

She ends by quoting a Polish writer and essayist who wrote about the war: "People must learn to better anticipate the consequences of their actions."

As the next speaker, Janina Iwańska, prepares to make her speech the tent at Auschwitz is filled with the music of Józef Kropiński - a Polish musician sent to the camp for publishing an underground newspaper.

Janina, an Aushchwitz survior, begins with a description of the camp. It began as a for adults - mostly Poles - until young boys were moved here for their activity in the Polish scouting movement. Later, it became a camp for tens of thousands Soviet prisoners of war, she says.

Iwańska says: "Those Russians and Poles would become subject to test which gas would be most efficient. Winters here were truly tragic, lots of poverty, lots of very hard work, little to eat...If you disliked anything you would be killed."

She says 12,000 people were moved to Auschwitz in 1942, when it was commissioned, but only 500 survived.

"It was no longer a prisoner of war camp, when the killing machine started its operation, all they would do here was kill people," she says, recalling how inmates brought from other countries would be driven to gas chambers. It is uncertain exactly how many people died here.

Jews and Roma were considered inhuman and were exterminated, says Iwańska, with experiments also being conducted on children and new born babies.

Those inside the tent at Birkenau include survivors, relatives and dignitaries - the media are in a separate area.

As these photos show, many of those listening are wearing blue and white scarves - in a nod to the clothes worn by the prisoners in the camp before the liberation.

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

Another Polish survivor of the death camp, Janina Iwanska is now 94. She is Catholic, not Jewish, and she was arrested by the Nazis during the Warsaw Uprising of 1944, when Poles sought to force the Nazis out of the capital as Soviet forces advanced.

German forces retaliated by deporting 13,000 residents of Warsaw to Auschwitz, and Iwanska was one of almost 6,000 young people who arrived at the camp in August 1944. She had been living in the Wola area of Warsaw where up to 50,000 residents were indiscriminately murdered in response to the Uprising.

She has just spoken passionately of the “killing machine” the Nazis created at Birkenau, and has reminded us of the 21,000 Roma and Sinti who were among those murdered here. In one night alone, the infamous SS “Angel of Death”, Josef Mengele, sent those Roma who were still alive to the gas chambers, because he no longer needed them for his terrible experiments.

Marian Turski calls for a moment's silence, before continuing his speech.

He goes on to describe the current "huge rise in antisemitism" across the world, which he says is what led to the Holocaust decades ago.

He praises Deborah Lipstadt, American historian and diplomat, who called out the "tsunami of antisemitism" and fought against Holocaust denial.

Turski adds: "Let us not fear discussing the problems that torment the so-called last generation".

Turski's speech ends, followed by applause.

We are now hearing from Marian Turski, a survivor of Auschwitz. He is a member of the International Auschwitz Council.

He begins by giving his "warmest thoughts and feelings" to fellow survivors, "who have shared this misery with me. The inmates", he says.

"It is absolutely understandable, if not downright obvious, that people, that the media, turn to us, to those that survived, so that we share with them our memories," he adds, according to a translation.

He says this small minority of survivors "went though all those selections".

"Those who lived to see freedom, there were hardly, hardly, none. So few. And now, there is only a handful."

Turski says this is why he believes their thoughts should go towards the millions of victims "who will never tell us what they experienced or they felt, just because they were consumed by that mass destruction."

He mentions a poem that has survived, which he says "goes beyond anything that the mind can imagine".

He reads a bit of the letter that the poet wrote to her friend, she was killed.

The letter reads: "'I'm going to a very distinct place, a station which is unknown for it is not on any map. There is the sky hanging over the station like a huge black lid."

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

At 98, Marian Turski is a very symbolic choice of speaker for this event.

He survived the Lodz Ghetto as a teenager and was deported to Auschwitz where his brother and father were murdered.

He lived through two death marches and since the war he has worked tirelessly to establish a Museum of History of Polish Jews in Warsaw.

His voice, although now frail, is powerful and profound, and a reminder that despite their frailty and age, the survivors still have a lot to say.

The ceremony begins with a slideshow of photos from Auschwitz, set to haunting, reflective music by German Jewish composer James Simon, who was killed at Auschwitz.

The attendees are silent as they are shown the images, while some of the survivors have their eyes closed.

The image of a railway wagon lingers on the screens, a reminder of the tragic transportation to Auschwitz. A wagon was placed here as a symbol 15 years ago, to serve as a memory of all those who perished.

Image source, Reuters

The service commemorating 80 years since the liberation of Auschwitz is starting now, to the haunting sound of Lament, composed by James Simon, a Jewish German composer who was killed at Auschwitz in 1944.

It's taking place in a large tent, constructed over the entrance gate to Auschwitz-Birkenau.

We'll be hearing testimony and addresses from survivors, music performances and prayers.

In attendance are delegates and world leaders including Britain's King Charles and Ukraine's President Volodymyr Zelensky.

You can follow along by pressing the watch live button at the top of this page, and we'll bring you the key lines. Stay with us.

Image source, Reuters

Image source, Getty Images

As we've been reporting, the main memorial event at Auschwitz is beginning shortly, in a special tent that has been purpose built over the gate that enters into Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

About 50 people who survived the camp are attending the commemorations and will address the invited guests, including Stanislaw Zalewski, Janina Iwanska, Bogdan Bartnikowski and Naki Bega.

State delegates, including the UK's King Charles III and Poland's President Andrzej Duda will also be in attendance.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky, King Willem-Alexander and Queen Maxima of the Netherlands and Spain's King Felipe VI and Queen Letizia will also be attending.

Canada, Croatia, Ireland and Israel are also expected to send representatives. There is no Russian presence, as BBC's Paul Kirby explains.