The Greek Jewish community is fighting to have former camp commander Alois Brunner extradited from Syria and brought to justice. Reportedly, Brunner has been residing in Syria since the 1990’s, Kathimerini said.

He is said to be guilty for sending about 50 000 people from the Jewish community in Thessaloniki to death camps. However, the report said that there was no current evidence that Brunner was still alive.

Regardless, Greece sought to amend the current law, which was signed in 1959, whereby the country “relinquished its right” to prosecute Nazis. The proposed amendments “will be attached to another bill being submitted to Greek parliament this week”.

“This is more of a moral victory, since most of the people in question have died,” said David Saltiel, the chairman of the Central Board of Jewish Communities in Greece, quoted by Kathimerini.

Grandma, Aviva Rohloff Zylberberg, was a child herself during the Holocaust, that cataclysm of cataclysms in the blood-soaked 20th century. A Jew in Germany, she survived by passing as a Christian. Other young people — some in their 30s but most in their teens — also rose at the Park Avenue Synagogue, on East 87th Street, to recount in a few unadorned sentences how a grandmother or a grandfather eluded the Nazis’ industrialized slaughter of Europe’s Jews.

Cara Levine told of Anne and Saul Celnik, who hid in Warsaw after escaping from that city’s ghetto. Jennifer and Matt Balaban spoke of Irene Anshelewitz Schwadron, who endured through concentration camps and a death march. “Our two great-aunts were killed,” Matt Balaban said, “but the bullets somehow missed our grandmother.” Michael Silverstone talked about Henry Vogelstein, who fled Nazi Germany in 1939, emigrated to the United States and returned to Germany as an American combat soldier.

If an event may be said to possess a commodity, then, by definition, memory is the principal one for Holocaust Remembrance Day. But it is a perishable commodity. Preserving it requires work.

The day was observed in various ways around the city. As usual, the largest event was a ceremony at Temple Emanuel. At the Jewish Community Center in Manhattan, on the Upper West Side, there was a daylong recitation of names of the dead. In Lower Manhattan, some survivors went to the Museum of Jewish Heritage — A Living Memorial to the Holocaust, to relate their experiences to visiting schoolchildren.

More and more, though, survivors are not the principal bearers of their own stories. That responsibility is falling with greater urgency to their children and, as the Park Avenue Synagogue ceremony underscored, to their grandchildren. The war, after all, ended 65 years ago. Holocaust survivors are not getting any younger. Worse, one by one they are not getting any older.

“This has long been considered one of the looming events in Holocaust education: What are we going to do when the last survivor passes,” said David G. Marwell, director of the heritage museum. “Survivors are an irreplaceable resource. Anyone who says ‘You’ll be able to do the same kind of education’ is wrong, I think.”

Relegating the Nazis’ crimes solely to textbooks is not enough, Mr. Marwell said: “We rely increasingly on the second generation to tell their parents’ stories, so that there is still the human factor.”

A shift of this sort is never sudden; the torch-passing has been under way for a while. And it isn’t as if the generation of survivors has disappeared.

Selfhelp Community Services, a nonprofit organization that has long assisted sufferers of Nazi persecution, puts the number in the five boroughs at about 33,000, with two-thirds of them living in Brooklyn, many below the poverty line. In 15 years, Selfhelp says, that number is expected to be cut in half. Even so, that would leave about 16,500 survivors.

“It’s important to remember those who are still alive,” said Elihu Kover, the organization’s vice president for Nazi Victims Services.

But the emphasis on a new generation is inexorable. That “transfer of memory” was behind Park Avenue Synagogue’s reliance on grandchildren, said Menachem Z. Rosensaft, a lawyer, who organized the program with a cantor at the synagogue, Elana Rozenfeld.

Interlaced with the stories of ordeal and endurance were songs in Yiddish, written for the most part during the Holocaust. They drew attention to “the inner and spiritual strengths required to survive,” Mr. Rosensaft said. “That’s a core ingredient of the human condition. Focusing on it doesn’t get old.”

Cantor Rozenfeld movingly sang tunes like “Yisrolik,” about a tough yet caring boy of that name in the Vilna Ghetto, and “S’Brent” (“It Is Burning”), written in Poland in 1938. “Ugly winds are blowing,” it warned prophetically.

One song written after the war was a sad, sweet number called “Mayn Shvester Chaye” (“My Sister Chaye”). This was a tribute by a Yiddish poet, Binem Heller, to his sister, who raised him in their house “with tumbledown steps.” Chaye, with the green eyes. Chaye, with the black braids. Chaye, who died in the Treblinka extermination camp, not quite 10 years old.

The 10,000 or so people from around the world attending the annual March of the Living walked the stretch of about 3 kilometers (2 miles) between the red-brick Auschwitz compound and the death camp’s wooden barracks section of Birkenau.

At least 1.1 million people — mostly Jews, Poles and Roma — died in the gas chambers at Auschwitz or from starvation, disease and forced labor at the camp that German Nazis built in occupied Poland during World War II.

Many in Monday’s annual march also wore black arm bands or carried black ribbons in memory of Poland’s President Lech Kaczynski and his wife, Maria, who were killed in a plane crash Saturday along with 94 others en route to WWII-era observances in western Russia.

Israeli Ambassador Zvi Rav-Ner read out a message in Hebrew, English and Polish saying this year’s marchers were also “paying homage” to Kaczynski and the other plane crash victims.

“Lech Kaczynski and his wife were friends of the state of Israel and of the Jewish nation. Today we will march in solidarity with the entire Polish nation,” Rav-Ner said while standing by the infamous gate with a sign reading “Arbeit Macht Frei,” or “Work Makes You Free.”

The inscription was meant to mislead inmates into thinking they were arriving at Auschwitz to work, not die. The metal sign now in place is a replica of the original, which is undergoing renovation after it was stolen in December and recovered two days later.

By tradition, the march started with the blowing of the shofar, or ram’s horn, at the gate.

The Auschwitz camp was liberated in January 1945 by Soviet troops.

The wail of air raid sirens pierced the air for two minutes as the country came to a standstill in a yearly ritual remembering the 6 million Jews who perished in World War II. People stood at attention and traffic halted during the moment of silence, as radio stations played mournful music throughout the day.

Israel was built on the ashes of the Holocaust, and preserving the memory of the Nazi genocide plays a central role in the country’s identity.

At the memorial’s opening ceremony late Sunday, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu tried to draw parallels to the rise of Nazi Germany and the development of Iran’s nuclear program.

Israel, like the West, believes Iran is developing nuclear weapons, and Netanyahu derided the world’s response to curbing Tehran’s atomic ambitions as limp.

“If we have learned anything from the Holocaust, it is that we must not be silent or be deterred in the face of evil,” Netanyahu said.

Israel considers a nuclear-armed Iran an existential threat, underscored by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated references to the Jewish state’s destruction and Tehran’s support for anti-Israeli militant groups. Israel has hinted at taking military action against Iran if diplomacy fails.

The Yad Vashem memorial authority picked “Voices of the Survivors” as the theme of this year’s commemoration. Sixty-five years after World War II, about 207,000 aging survivors, many of them destitute and alone, live in Israel, down 63,000 from just two years earlier.

Survivors of the Nazi concentration camp Buchenwald gathered with dignitaries and US Army veterans to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the liberation of one of the largest Nazi concentration camps on German soil.

From 1937-1945, about 250,000 people were imprisoned in Buchenwald, near the eastern German city of Weimar.

Camp prisoners came from all over Europe and Russia, and worked primarily as forced labor in armament factories. When US Army forces arrived at the camp on April 11, 1945, they liberated about 21,000 people – most of them shockingly emaciated.

Unknown victims

The anniversary of the liberation comes just one day after the Buchenwald Memorial Foundation announced it had published online a virtual memorial – a list of those killed by the Nazis at the camp.

The memorial list contains the names of 38,000 victims researchers and volunteers were able to confirm. However, the names of thousands more who died during what were known as the “death marches” toward the end of the war are still not known.

More than 56,000 people are said to have died in Buchenwald and outlying camps before the war ended in 1945 either through execution, starvation or disease. Victims included Jews, communists, gays, Roma and Sinti, and others from across central Europe.

In the virtual list, a page has been dedicated to each of the known victims, carrying details like dates of birth and death.

The spokesman for the memorial appealed to relatives to send in additional information to enable them to complete the obituary for each.

It took 10 years’ work and research, including the examination of more than 500,000 documents to draw up the list, which is still incomplete.

The online memorials on the Web site are currently in German, but they are expected to be posted in other languages as well.

The neatly typed envelope addressed to family in Nuremberg, Germany, was returned to its sender five years later, on Sept. 5, 1946. It bore two official rubber stamp marks in German: “House destroyed, address unknown,’’ and “Further address unknown.’’

To postal historians, the yellowed envelope contains as much history as the birthday greeting inside. It captures — in labels and dates and locations — no less than the unfolding of the Holocaust. Lauer’s family was transported to Nazi concentration camps shortly after the letter was sent, and a local exhibition shows how their fate, like that of many Jewish Holocaust victims, can be traced through what remains of their mail.

An envelope with a camp-made stamp and cancellation mark from the barracks postal system created by Polish officers imprisoned by Nazis

“It’s the story of the mail, the mail that surfaced during the war and after the war,’’ said Schwab, now 88. “I don’t really tell the story of the Holocaust, which has been told endless times. I give the evidence of the mail. Where it was sent from, where it was censored, and where it was canceled leads to telling the story of the fate of these people.’’

The show draws on the extensive research Schwab conducted while writing “The Echoes That Remain’’ (Spellman Museum, 1992), a book that deciphers the personal Holocaust stories captured by hundreds of pieces of World War II correspondence.

The effort began with 12 pages of family mail and grew from there.

In his status update on Thursday, Tifatul wrote: “the union between two children, when both of them complete each other, this is magic – Adolf Hitler”.

Human rights activist Fadjroel Rachman expressed disappointment in Tifatul’s lack of respect for millions of people killed in genocide perpetrated by the Nazis during World War II.

“A criminal towards humanity, a racist executioner of 6 million Jews like Adolf Hitler is the real enemy of democracy,” Fadjroel said on his Twitter status update, apparently in response to Tifatul.

Tifatul of the Muslim-based Prosperous Justice Party answered a question from one of his followers on that matter, saying he did not have any affectionate sentiments towards Hitler and that he only loved Allah.

Tifatul’s username on Twitter is @tifsembiring, while Fadjroel is @fadjroel.

This is not the first time the two traded arguments on the popular social networking. Previously, Fadjroel criticized Tifatul for his reluctance to greet the country’s Christian community on Good Friday and Easter.