Thousands of Jews attended March of the Living in Poland

Walking along the three kilometre (1.8 mile) path from the infamous "Arbeit macht frei" gate sign towards the crematoria of Birkenau, they paid tribute to the millions of Jews murdered by the Nazis during World War Two.

This year's ceremony was overshadowed by the events last year when 1,200 people were killed in a Hamas-led rampage through Israeli towns and 253 hostages were taken, according to Israeli tallies.

Daniel Louz, a 90-year-old whose hometown Kibbutz Beeri lost a tenth of its residents to the Palestinian attackers, came to the Auschwitz camp on Monday for the first time since his mother's family was killed there in 1942.

"I am convinced that on October 7 in Beeri the good souls (of the Holocaust dead) protected me and did not let the Hamas criminals shoot at our home," Louz told Reuters. "So that I might be able to tell the story. I am really thankful to you all."

More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, perished in gas chambers or from starvation, cold and disease at Auschwitz, which Germans set up in occupied Poland during World War Two.

More than three million of Poland's 3.2 million Jews were murdered by the Nazis, accounting for about half of the Jews killed in the Holocaust.

"Prior to October 7 it is my belief ... that the worst event in human history happened on these grounds. That this place, the very word Auschwitz, speaks volumes in one word about fear, death, destruction, annihilation," Phyllis Greenberg Heideman, President of the International March of the Living, said during Monday's event.

"And then came October 7, and perhaps we have to come as a people to the realisation that perhaps in some ways the Shoah (Holocaust) isn't over for us. It's not a competition, certainly not a comparison, it's a continuum."

A small group of pro-Palestinian protesters gathered near the path followed by the procession. Among them was Omar Faris, head of an association of Palestinians in Poland.

"This protest is to say that we also bow our heads to the Holocaust victims and at the same time we demand to stop the war, stop the genocidal war which is led by a criminal Netanyahu (Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu) with the help of the United States," Faris said.

"We want to tell all of those young people who came from around the world, Jews who want to remember their ancestors who were killed, that their ancestors who are still alive, they do the same Holocaust with us."

The International March of the Living is an annual educational program, bringing individuals from around the world to Poland and Israel to study the history of the Holocaust and to examine the roots of prejudice, intolerance and hatred.

Since its inception in 1988, more than 300,000 alumni from 50 countries have marched down the same 3-kilometer path leading from Auschwitz to Birkenau on Holocaust Remembrance Day – Yom Hashoah – as a tribute to all victims of the Holocaust.