World leaders are gathering in Poland for a ceremony to mark the 70th anniversary of the start of the Second World War.
Britain's foreign secretary David Miliband is joining the likes of German chancellor Angela Merkel, Polish president Lech Kaczynski and Russian prime minister Vladimir Putin for the commemoration service in Gdansk.
The city is near the Westerplatte peninsula, where the German battleship Schleswig-Holstein shelled a tiny Polish military outpost on September 1 1939.
They were the opening salvos of the Second World War, which lasted for nearly six years and caused the deaths of more than 50 million people.
Britain declared war on Germany on September 3 and within a month Poland was overwhelmed by Nazi forces from the west. The country was also attacked from the east by the Soviet Union, which had signed a pact with Hitler's Germany. Poland went on to lose some six million citizens in the conflict - more than half of them Jews - and see many of its factories, museums, libraries and villages destroyed.
During the Nazi occupation, the country was also used to host several extermination camps including Auschwitz and Sobibor, where millions were put to death.
Writing on his Foreign Office blog, Mr Miliband said: "We have a duty to remember the sacrifices, including of Poles fighting in and alongside British forces, and to learn the right lessons - about confronting racism and xenophobia, about standing up against tyranny, and about building international co-operation."
He added: "This will be a poignant return to Poland for me, as my mother survived the War in hiding in Poland before coming to the UK in 1946."
