Seventy years after the Holocaust, mankind has still not learned the lessons of those terrible events, according to President Marie-Louise Coleiro Preca.

The President joined world leaders at Auschwitz and about 300 survivors of the former Nazi death camp to mark the 70th anniversary of its liberation by the Soviet army in 1945.

“We have allowed ourselves to forget,” she said. “The ambition of the few is once again trampling over human dignity; it is prevailing over people’s needs and the need for us to live in peace if we are to move forward.”

The President also spoke of the poignancy of coming face to face with survivors of the Auschwitz atrocities. About 1.5 million people were murdered at Auschwitz during World War II, part of a genocide that took the lives of six million Jews across the continent.

“In spite of these experiences of such cruelty and of all those who lost family members, people are still chasing personal ambition at the expense of the good of mankind,” she said. The commemoration on Tuesday took place in the shadow of deadly attacks in Paris on the offices of satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket. Four French Jews were among the dead in the latter attack.

The attack followed the killing of four people at the Jewish Museum in Brussels last May and a rabbi and three children in Toulouse in 2012. “For a time, we thought that the hatred of Jews had finally been eradicated.

“But, slowly, the demonisation of Jews started to come back,” Ronald Lauder, president of the World Jewish Congress, said at the commemoration.

What might have been in part a celebration of peace in Europe was also undermined by the continuing state of war in Ukraine.

Russian President Vladimir Putin was not invited to the ceremony, due to his country’s involvement in the conflict.

Ms Coleiro Preca called on the Maltese people to recall the hardships suffered by their own country due to war.

“We must never forget the mission of our country as catalyst in promoting peace and dialogue,” she said.