KRAKOW, Poland - Seven thousand people, including 800 Canadians, gathered in the heart of Krakow's historic Jewish quarter last night for an emotional ceremony marking Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day.

With some still recovering from visits only hours earlier to the Auschwitz-Birkenau death camp of the Second World War, they mourned the millions dead in the Holocaust that ended 60 years ago.

"This is about everyone coming together and showing - proving - that fighting intolerance and hatred is everybody's issue," said McGill University sociology student Lise Treutler, 19, whose grandfather was a Polish PoW in the Second World War.

Last night, she was one of 7,000 people, mostly Jews but also some non-Jews like her, who stood in a rain-soaked square in Krakow's Kazimierz district to listen to speeches by Israeli politicians, sing kaddish with an Israeli cantor, hear a choir and watch black-and-white Holocaust film footage on two giant screens flanking the stage.

Most of all, they were there to remember the dead.

"I was born in 1941, and if I had been born here in Krakow instead of in Montreal, I wouldn't be here talking to you," said Eddie Wiltzer, a Montreal garment importer and past chairman of the Combined Jewish Appeal fundraising group who is on his fourth trip to Poland.

"It's important to tell everyone what happened, and we're doing that by being here," he said.

Many in the crowd were schoolchildren in Poland on their first trip abroad, viewing the Holocaust from where it happened.

"It's amazing to be here with people from all around the world, to cry together and show all the pride we have, too," said Stephanie Rishikof, 17, a Montrealer who is one of 58 Bialik High School students touring the country.

The ceremony is part of the biggest-ever March of the Living, an annual tour of Poland and also of Israel by Holocaust survivors and their descendants as well as others in Jewish and non-Jewish communities around the world. The journey is the prime event of education programs run by Israel and Jewish organizations in the diaspora.

Wearing special passes and checked at the gates to the Szeroka St. square by a joint force of Israeli and Polish security guards and police, the crowd last night watched the 90-minute ceremony by Kazimierz's Old Synagogue mostly in silence, bathed in red floodlights.

"This isn't just about the Jews; it's a celebration of the sameness of people and not letting evil take over the world again," said Marilyn Fichman, a Montreal speech pathologist who's Jewish and who has come with her husband on her first trip to Poland.