It's been 60 years since Auschwitz was liberated by the Red Army. Soviet soldiers found just 7,000 inmates remaining on the grounds recently abandoned by the Nazis, many of them no more than living skeletons. The sight of the emaciated bodies of the living and the corpses of the dead piled high still haunt human memory. Today, world leaders and a dwindling number of aging survivors gathered together on the grounds of the Nazi's most infamous extermination camp to remember the past and to protect the future.

Approximately 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz as part of the Nazis 'Final Solution.' The vast majority of them were Jews. Auschwitz was, at its prime, a factory of death. Upon arrival, the very young and elderly and those unable to work were sent immediately to the gas chambers to be killed. The remaining prisoners were worked and starved until they were too sick or weak to continue and then they met the same fate as their families.

Dignitaries at today's services include Russian President Vladimir Putin, French President Jacques Chirac and American Vice President Dick Cheney.

A small group of survivors also gathered, all of them aging. At each anniversary there are fewer of them left as they struggle with painful memories that will never leave them.

Others are here to remember family members. 'I am not here to talk about what happened. My only aim is to light a candle for my mother, whose ashes are who knows where in this camp,' said Jan Wojciech Topolewski who survived Auschwitz but lost his mother in the camp.

Vice President Cheney added, 'The presence of this camp indicates that evil is real. We need to deal with it and call it so.'

Despite the memorial services, genocides have continued in the years since the liberation of Auschwitz... Cambodia...the former Yugoslavia...Rwanda..and now the Sudan. The world must mean it when it says, 'Never again.'