Today is the 60-year anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the Nazis’ most notorious and efficient death camp. A ceremony was held in remembrance.

As candles flickered in the snowy, winter gloom, world leaders and Auschwitz survivors Thursday remembered victims of the Holocaust on the 60th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi death camp.

The ceremony, which opened with the sound of an approaching train, was held on the spot where new arrivals at the vast camp were subject to “selection” — meaning a few were deemed able to work, while most were taken immediately to gas chambers.

“For a former inmate of Auschwitz, it is an unimaginable and overwhelming emotion to be able to speak in this cemetery without graves, the largest one in the history of Europe,” said Wladyslaw Bartoszewski, a survivor who later became Poland’s foreign minister.

When he arrived in 1940, he recalled, “I never imagined I would outlive Hitler or survive World War II.”

Girl Scouts brought blankets to elderly survivors sitting in the freezing cold and heavy snowfall.

A covering of snow has never hidden Auschwitz’s horrors, not today and certainly not on the day it was liberated 60 years ago, reports CBS News Correspondent Mark Phillips.

Presidents Aleksander Kwasniewski of Poland, Vladimir Putin of Russia, and Moshe Katsav of Israel also attended the ceremony. German President Horst Koehler was present, but plans called for him to remain silent in token acknowledgment of his country’s role as perpetrator of the Holocaust, in which 6 million Jews died during World War II.

Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and the neighboring camp at Birkenau, or Brzezinka in Polish, on Jan. 27, 1945. Some 1.5 million people, most of them Jews, had died at the two camps from gassing, starvation, exhaustion, beatings and disease.

Other victims included Soviet prisoners of war, Poles, Gypsies, homosexuals and political opponents of the Nazis.

Earlier in Krakow, Vice President Dick Cheney noted that it did not happen in some far-off place but “in the heart of the civilized world.”

“The story of the camps shows that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted,” he said.

Vice President Cheney is right. When confronted with the existence of evil, we tend to close our eyes to it. We say that it’s horrible but it’ll never happen here. It’s always in some distant country where the people are backwards and uncivilized. We tell ourselves it could never happen in a civilized country like ours.

Well, it can. And unless we stand up against evil and are willing to confront it and fight it, it will. Auschwitz — and the Holocaust — should serve as a constant reminder of that. Millions of people were murdered while the world looked the other way.

Meanwhile, Muslims could always be counted upon to be sensitive and tolerant of the suffering of others. Today they showed this by boycotting the Holocaust remembrance because no one thought to include Muslims and the “holocaust” of the Palestinian intifada. Of course, comparing the Palestinian “holocaust” to the actual Holocaust could not be more ridiculous. Last time I checked, during WWII the Jews were not firing rockets into Germany and trying to wipe the country off the map. Jews were not trying to annihilate Germans, nor did they try to deprive Germany of its very right to exist. No, the Jews were targeted and murdered just because of who they were, much the same as what is happening in the Middle East to Israel. But this time around, the Jews are making the apparently horrible choice to fight back. And they’re kicking some terrorist ass, which now makes it a Palestinian holocaust. Yeah, good luck with that one.

Hat Tip: The Jawa Report