Monday marks Holocaust Remembrance Day

(CBS, KYMA/KECY) - It's Holocaust Remembrance Day and the 80th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the largest Nazi concentration camp. World leaders gathered to attend the commemorative ceremony.

It comes at a time of growing antisemitism, with a recent Anti-Defamation League (ADL) poll showing nearly half of adults worldwide have significant antisemitic beliefs. However, there is a new effort devoted to fighting extremism.

It's a horror 96-year-old Teresa Regula lived: Taken from her home, her mother executed, and at age 16, sent to a death camp called Auschwitz because she is Jewish.

"I repressed all such memories, I repressed them as best I could," Regula said.

But now, the terrible memories are flooding back, including the severe pain she experienced having her head shaved.

Holocaust survivor Janina Iwanska can still remember the smell of burning bodies and small children being torn away from their mothers.

She says, "The mothers almost ripped the hands of these children off, because they did not want to let them go."

More than 1.1 million people, mostly Jews, were murdered at Auschwitz, either in the concentration camp's gas chambers, or from starvation, disease, and the cold.

Now, the nearby home of the Nazi, who oversaw the death camp, is being transformed into the Auschwitz Center on Hate, Extremism, and Radicalization.

"My dream, and those of our colleagues, is that every visitor, every fellow, every academic that comes here takes action to fight extremism and anti-Semitism wherever they come from," said Mark Wallace, CEO of the Counter Extremist Project.

The center will focus on research to fight extremism, working to ensure history does not repeat itself.

Six million Jews from all over Europe were killed during the Holocaust.