OSWIECIM, Poland – Vice President Cheney remembered the Holocaust yesterday, saying that the mass murder that went unanswered until Nazi death camps were liberated exactly 60 years ago is a reminder that evil must be faced down in the world today.

“The story of the camps remind us that evil is real and must be called by its name and must be confronted,” Mr. Cheney said at a forum in Krakow, where he spoke before attending an anniversary program at the concentration camps here. “We are reminded that anti-Semitism may begin with words but rarely stops with words and the message of intolerance and hatred must be opposed before it turns into acts of horror.”

While he didn’t draw the comparison directly, the subtext of Mr. Cheney’s message melded with the theme of President Bush’s Inauguration Day speech about freedom versus tyranny as well as one of his previous State of the Union addresses when he called Iraq, North Korea, and Iran the “axis of evil.”

Within site of the ruins of crematoria, Mr. Cheney listened as dignitaries, including President Putin, and religious leaders from all faiths spoke solemnly about the massive deaths at Auschwitz and Birkenau, the larger of the two camps.

Aging Holocaust survivors, some wearing tags displaying their prison number, huddled under blankets at the outdoor ceremony to ward off heavy, blowing snow and freezing temperatures.

Mr. Cheney, wearing a heavy olive parka with a white fur-edged hood, sat between his wife, Lynne, and Israel’s president, Moshe Katsav, who in his remarks, given in Hebrew, said, “It seems as if we can still hear the dead crying out.”

The Soviet Army freed prisoners at the camps on January 27, 1945, as the war neared its end. Between 1 million and 1.5 million prisoners – most of them Jews – perished in gas chambers or died of starvation and disease at Auschwitz.

Overall, 6 million Jews were killed in the Holocaust.

“On this day in 1945, inside a prison for the innocent, liberators arrived and looked into the faces of thousands near death – while miles beyond the camp, many thousands more were being led on a death march in the winter cold,” Mr. Cheney said in his remarks earlier in the day.