Leaders to Attend Auschwitz Anniversary

About 14 heads of state, including Russian President Putin, Israel's President Katzav, French President Chirac and Polish President Kwasniewski, will attend next month's 60th anniversary ceremony of the liberation by Russian troops of the former Nazi death camp at Auschwitz in southern Poland. About 10,000 people are also expected to take part in the Jan. 27, 2005 ceremony for the camp which was liberated on the same day in 1945 by the Red Army and has since become a symbol of the Holocaust, the German Nazi regime's genocide of Europe's Jews. Andrzej Przewoznik, the Polish official in charge of organizing the commemorations, said the event would be unique, gathering "probably for the last time" surviving camp detainees and Red Army soldiers. "Former deportees will come from the whole world including from Israel, Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Hungary," Przewoznik said.