Recently, a live TV broadcast held me spellbound as I watched the ceremony held in southern Poland to mark the 60th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz-Birkenau, where 1.5 million people ?mostly Jews ?were killed during World War II. What a solemn and stirring scene it was when world leaders and frail survivors alike gathered beside the ruins of the former Nazi death camp under heavy snowfall and in bitter cold to remember the victims of the Holocaust.

Auschwitz calls out to our memory as well as to our minds. Those who came to the commemoration not only wanted to pay tribute to the victims and survivors, but more importantly, they wished to show to the world their strong determination that such tragedies and sorrows should never be repeated.

Of all those present at the ceremony, Germany's President Horst Koehler stood out as the most spectacular figure as he placed a candle without speaking, in recognition of his country's role in the Holocaust. This reminded me of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder attending a ceremony held in Caen, France last June to mark the 60th anniversary of the Allied landing in Normandy. Not only did the German leader attend the event, meant to commemorate a landmark failure of his country, but he himself laid a wreath at a British Commonwealth cemetery to show his deep remorse for what his country had done to its neighbours and the civilized world.

In this respect, German is a great nation. It does not sidestep its disgraceful past, but instead thinks it a moral duty to let the world know what really happened in the war, so that the infamy of the Nazi atrocities will never return.

German leaders have shown the country's moral spirit when they show high resolve that hatred, racism and anti-Semitism in Germany as well as in other parts of the world should be rooted out.

In the course of my career as a project manager, I have been to Germany many times. What impressed me most was the general public's clear understanding of what great suffering the country brought to the world in the past. Many common folks wore a guilty look when we talked with them about the history of the nation, even though they themselves were not responsible for the wartime crimes. While we brought up the topic only warily lest they felt embarrassed, they always gave an unequivocally worded reply condemning the Nazi regime's genocide policy. Most of them had a strong sense of repentance. Even kids could come out with good-or-bad statements about their country's blood-stained past.

By contrast, our neighbour Japan lags far behind in its awareness of the towering crimes it committed against other Asian countries. According to a recent survey by an institution on Japan studies, more than 50 per cent of Chinese people do not feel close to Japan, because it has not seriously reflected on its invasion of China between 1937 and 1945. A considerable number of those interviewed even feel "very unneighbourly? attributing their ill feeling towards Japan to the lack of self-examination on Japan's part after World War II.

Some Japanese leaders have stubbornly clung to a wrongful position, the most glaring examples of this being its refusal to admit to the Nanjing Massacre, the frequent visits to the Yasukuni Shrine by high-ranking officials, and the altering or suppression in school textbooks of important historical facts related to Japan's wartime aggression, just to name a few.

It is a pity that some people in Japan vainly try to sow the seed of "patriotism?in the soil of historical ignorance and national chauvinism. Unfortunately that begins with tampering with history in textbooks for school children. As a result, most youngsters in Japan today know very little, if anything, about the country's bloody outrages in the past, which we Chinese find overwhelmingly painful to recall even today.

The Chinese people have always taken a future-oriented attitude towards Sino-Japanese ties. But history cannot be distorted. Neither should right be confounded with wrong. How a country handles its history of aggression is a serious matter, and only deep soul-searching and sincere repentance along with concrete action can win the trust of the victimized nations and the hearts of the world's people. That is what Germany has been working for all along.