Nearly 10 thousand people have joined a march for Auschwitz in Poland on Thursday, Holocaust Memorial Day, in memory of some six million Jews who perished in the Holocaust during World War II.

The participants are mostly Jewish teenagers, Poles and World War II survivors.

They were dressed in the blue and white colours of Israel, and walked in silence from the red brick houses of the notorious Nazi death camp Auschwitz to Birkenau, another area of the camp site.

Many marchers are sad about the victims, saying it was important to make the visit and honour the dead.

"This place, what was here is horrible. But we are coming here to be together with the people who were here in this campus and to tell those people, to show to everybody that we are here and we are coming here and we want a memory of these people who were here and also we think in the future, to make Jewish life easier and that the Jewish people and everybody should live more proud and more famous and without fear."

"We are the second generation and we didn't live this sorrow and this pain and all these things made to the Jews but we tried to understand, to touch something, that's it."

The March of the Living started in 1988 as a bi-annual event open only to Jews. But in the 1990s it became an annual commemmoration in which people of all faiths can join.