Victims of Holocaust remembered

Melancholy music floated over the airwaves and tales of the fast-dwindling number of Holocaust survivors dominated the media as the world's largest survivor community mourned the dead.

As a two-minute air raid siren sounded, an annual ritual heard across Israel, drivers switched off their engines and people put aside their daily activities to stand at attention.

The front page of the Yediot Ahronot daily carried a black-and-white photo of a bearded Jewish Pole, wrapped in a prayer shawl, kneeling before two Nazi soldiers, his arms raised, fists clenched, before he was executed.

The man was the maternal grandfather of Meir Dagan, chief of the Mossad spy agency, who told the newspaper: "I see that photo every day and vow that a thing like that will not happen again."

Sixty five years after the end of the war, about 207,000 ageing survivors, many of them destitute and alone, live in Israel, down 63,000 from just two years earlier. The Jewish state is home to the largest survivor community.