Katya Adler
BBC Europe editor

"Seeing a concentration camp with my own eyes and listening to a survivor who went through it all, that's really brought it home. It's important for young people like me. We'll soon be able to vote. The far right is gaining more and more support in Germany and we need to learn from the past."

Xavier is a 17-year-old German student. I met him at a Holocaust education centre in Dachau, in southern Germany, just around the corner from what was once a Nazi concentration camp of the same name. He and his classmates were spending two days there, learning about their country's Nazi past and debating its relevance in today's world.

Here in Europe, 80 years after the end of the Holocaust, societies seem increasingly divided. There's a rise in support for political parties, often, but not exclusively on the far right and far left, that are quick to point at the Other. The outsider. The unwanted. Be they migrants, Muslims, LGBTQ+ people or Jews.

"I want everyone to live together, Jewish, Catholic, black, white or whatever," says Eva Umlauf, the Holocaust survivor who made such an impression on the German teens.

She describes the Holocaust as a warning of what can happen when prejudice takes over.

"That's why I dedicate my time to talking, talking, talking," she says. Now in her 80s, she was the youngest inmate to be freed from the Nazi extermination camp, Auschwitz, eight decades ago today.

• More: Holocaust survivors fear Europe is forgetting the lessons of Auschwitz

Paul Kirby
Reporting from Auschwitz

About 50 survivors of the camp will return to the site on Monday to remember the day it was finally liberated on 27 January 1945.

Although daytime temperatures in recent days have climbed well above freezing and much of the snow has melted, many of the 50 arriving for Monday's commemorations are now too frail to stay in the open for long.

Instead, an enormous, heated tent has been erected over the "Death Gate", as the entrance to Birkenau is known.

There will be no political speeches from international leaders beside the Death Gate, and no Russian presence because of the full-scale war launched against Ukraine almost three years ago, even though the camp was liberated by the Russian-dominated 60th Army of the First Ukrainian Front.

Ivor Perl arrived at Auschwitz II-Birkenau with his mother, his four sisters and two of his brothers after they were rounded up in Hungary in 1944, when he was 12.

Only he and his brother Alec ultimately survived to see the camp liberated by the Soviets on 27 January 1945.

"The situation was horrendous. All I can say is that, eventually, when you used to go to bed, you hoped that the person you lived next to died overnight," he tells the BBC's Jordan Dunbar "Why? You could pinch his shoes or his clothes. We were not human beings anymore."

Ivor was selected to work in the labour camps and remembers being unable to imagine the "horrors" that would be unveiled when Auschwitz was liberated.

"However much horror you thought about, you’d never imagine what was happening," he says.

"Whoever imagines something about gassing people and burning them? You know, it never came into the mind."

After the liberation, Ivor and his brother were taken to a displaced persons camp. He was then selected to be taken to England under a British government scheme designed to help survivors, moving first to Southampton and then Ascot.

• You can learn more about Ivor's story in What Happened at Auschwitz on BBC iPlayer

Imogen James
Live page reporter

In bleak, cold December, I took a trip to Krakow. It feels like in going there, you must also face Auschwitz.

After taking a long drive in a mini bus, we pulled into Auschwitz I - there’s something extremely surreal about walking through those infamous black gates that I’ve seen so many times in books, documentaries and films.

I don’t think I uttered a word for the rest of the day.

The entire site is eerie. It’s quiet, it’s well kept, and it’s a brutal and stark reminder of what once was.

In this camp, you can see how the bunks were, the prisons, the uniforms, and where people lived and died.

Some rooms contain stacks and stacks of personal items, like pots and pans, suitcases and even hair.

We then went to Birkenau, a short drive away - most of this camp is gone now, bar a few standing buildings far in the distance from the railway tracks.

This place, felt perhaps heavier. Too brutal to stay intact, as the Nazis themselves destroyed so much of it to cover their tracks.

You can walk freely around the site, inside a building that remains as it was. Uninhabitable.

It’s a day that I think about often, and cannot imagine how people had the strength to survive.

Image source, Getty Images

To commemorate the 80th liberation of Auschwitz, all survivors from the camp have been invited to the grounds to mark the occasion. About 50 of them have returned today for the commemorations.

State delegates including the UK’s King Charles III and Poland’s President Andrzej Duda have also been invited to attend.

The main event will begin at 16:00CET (15:00 GMT), in a special tent that has been purpose built over the gate that enters into Auschwitz II-Birkenau.

There will be addresses from survivors, museum workers, and prayers.

This morning, there will be a wreath-laying ceremony, before a speech by the Polish president.

Image source, Getty Images

The Holocaust was the systematic murder of Europe’s Jews by the Nazis and their collaborators during World War Two.

The Nazis’ programme of anti-Jewish persecution began in 1933 when the Nazis came to power and began to strip Jewish people of all property, freedoms and rights under the law.

This escalated when the Nazis invaded and occupied Poland in 1939 and began deporting Jewish people to parts of the country, creating ghettos to separate them from the rest of the population.

But it was not until 1941 - during the German invasion of the USSR - that the Nazis began their campaign of extermination in earnest.

Groups of German soldiers called Einsatzgruppen set out across newly conquered lands in Eastern Europe to massacre civilians - by the end of 1941, they had killed 500,000 people and by 1945 they had murdered about two million, 1.3 million of whom were Jewish.

Experimenting with ways to kill en masse, the Nazis constructed their first gas chamber and crematorium at Auschwitz by the winter of 1941.

Nazi leaders met in January 1942 at the Wannsee Conference to coordinate the industrial slaughter - what they called a "final solution to the Jewish question" - of the entire European Jewish population by extermination and forced labour.

In the end, some six million Jews were murdered by the Nazis and their accomplices during World War Two.

More: How death camp became centre of Nazi Holocaust

Image source, Getty Images

Eighty years ago today the Auschwitz concentration and extermination camp in Nazi-occupied Poland was liberated.

In just over four and a half years, Nazi Germany systematically murdered at least 1.1 million people at the 40 camps that made up the Auschwitz complex, making it the site of the largest mass execution of human beings ever recorded.

Auschwitz was at the centre of the Nazi campaign to eradicate Europe's Jewish population, and almost one million of those who died there were Jews - but Poles, Roma and Russian prisoners of war, among many others, also perished at the camp.

Today, about 50 survivors of those atrocities will be joined by world leaders in Poland to commemorate the people murdered there.

We’ll be marking the commemorations here and across the rest of the BBC today, bringing you the latest updates from Poland, stories of survivors, and reminders of what happened in Auschwitz.

You can also follow our coverage by clicking Watch Live at the top of the page.