Oswiecim, Poland — The 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz by Soviet troops is being marked Monday at the site of the former death camp, a ceremony largely treated as the last big ceremony that a significant number of survivors will be able to attend.

Nazi German forces killed an estimated 1.1 million people at the site in southern Poland, which was under German occupation during World War II. Most of the victims were Jews killed on an industrial scale in gas chambers, but the Germans also killed many Poles, Roma, Soviet prisoners of war, homosexuals and others who were targeted for elimination in Nazi racial ideology.

Polish President Andrzej Duda, whose nation lost 6 million citizens during the war, laid a candle at the Wall of Death, where prisoners, including Poles who resisted the occupation of their country, were executed. He was surrounded by elderly camp survivors who were helped by family members.

In all, the Germans killed 6 million Jews from all over Europe, destroying two-thirds of European Jews and one-third of all Jews in the world. In 2005, the United Nations declared January 27 as International Holocaust Remembrance Day.

Later in the day, world leaders and members of the royal family will join the camp’s elderly survivors, the youngest of whom are in their 80s. Politicians, however, were not asked to speak this year. Due to the advanced age of the survivors, the organizers decided to make them the center of the commemoration.

Among the leaders who will attend are German Chancellor Olaf Scholz and President Frank-Walter Steinmeier. Germany has never before sent both of its top state representatives to the ceremony, according to the German news agency dpa.

It’s a sign of Germany’s continued commitment to taking responsibility for its nation’s crimes, even amid a growing far-right movement that he would like to forget them.

French President Emmanuel Macron and Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau will also come, and the British King Charles III and the kings and queens of Spain, Denmark and Norway will also be there.

The White House said Washington will be represented by U.S. Special Envoy for the Middle East Steve Witkoff and Commerce Secretary nominee Howard Lutnick, among others.

In the past, Russian representatives were central guests at the anniversary commemoration of the Soviet liberation of the camp on January 27, 1945, and the huge losses suffered by Soviet forces in the Allied defeat of Nazi Germany. But since then they are not welcome Russian full invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who is Jewish, said Monday that the world must unite against evil, reports Agence France-Presse.

“We must overcome the hatred that breeds abuse and murder. We must prevent forgetting. And it is everyone’s mission to do everything possible so that evil does not win,” he said, according to the press release of the presidency.