Religious leaders pay tribute at Auschwitz

AFP-01/02/2011

The visit, in the wake of ceremonies last week marking the 66th anniversary of the World War II camp's liberation, was part of the France-based "Aladin" project, launched in 2009 to promote inter-faith understanding and teach Holocaust history in Muslim nations.

"The key point of the Aladin project is that it enables figures from the three main monotheist religions, Christianity, Judaism and Islam, to come together in a place of genocide of the Jews," Cardinal Andre Vingt-Trois, the Roman Catholic archbishop of Paris, told AFP.

"It's a particularly important moment, because it's a sign showing that the faiths have taken the path of confronting this together," he added.

The participants held an inter-faith service at the site, before laying wreaths.

Auschwitz-Birkenau has become an enduring symbol of the Holocaust, Nazi Germany's wartime campaign of genocide against Europe's Jews.

A year after invading Poland in 1939, the Nazis opened what was to become a vast complex on the edge of the southern town of Oswiecim -- Auschwitz in German.

They later expanded it at the nearby village of Brzezinka, or Birkenau.

Of the six million Jews killed by Nazi Germany in the Holocaust, one million were murdered at the site, mostly in its notorious gas chambers, along with tens of thousands of others including Poles, Roma and Soviet prisoners of war.

The site is now a memorial and museum run and largely financed by the Polish state.