Auschwitz survivors and Israeli officials marked 69 years since the liberation of the nazi death camp in Poland.

The ceremony at the Auschwitz-Birkenau memorial took place on International Holocaust Remembrance Day, established by the United Nations in memory of six million Holocaust victims, 1.5 million of whom were victims of Auschwitz.

Some 20 survivors walked through the gate that still bears the infamous Arbeit Macht Frei (Work Makes You Free) sign and laid a wreath at the camp's Executions Wall, where inmates, including many Polish resistance members, were shot.

Around 60 members of the Knesset, half of the Israeli legislature, joined the survivors for the observances, which included visits to the Auschwitz barracks, housing a collection of the victims' belongings and hair, and a list of the names of some 4.2 million Jews who perished in the Holocaust.

In a special ceremony in the Birkenau section of the camp, they also heard from one of the survivors about the Death March, when some 15,000 died after nazis fleeing the advancing Soviet army in January 1945 forced inmates that were still able to walk to march west in freezing weather.

In Italy, meanwhile, President Giorgio Napolitano condemned recent threats against Rome's Jewish community.

He said that recent insults made against the Jewish community were "comparable only to the repugnant material in those packages," referring to a delivery of pigs' heads to prominent members of the country's Jewish community.

Elsewhere, German MPs honoured the victims of the nazi army's three-year siege of Leningrad as part of Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Daniil Granin, a 95-year-old Russian survivor, recounted in a speech to the Bundestag how thousands of people died of starvation each day during harsh winters in Leningrad.

The siege began in September 1941, three months after nazi Germany launched Operation Barbarossa against the Soviet Union.

Over a million Russian civilians and a similar number of Russian soldiers died before the blockade was finally broken on January 27 1944 and the Red Army went on to liberate Europe.