Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said Thursday he would run for a second term in May elections that opinion polls suggest the popular center-right head of state will win by a large margin.

The 62-year-old, who has been in the job since 2010 and is close to the Civic Platform (PO)governing party, will notably be up against a transsexual lawmaker and a political unknown with supermodel good looks.

A 93-year-old former Auschwitz death camp officer will go on trial in Germany in April charged with at least 300,000 counts of accessory to murder, a court said Monday.

The German defendant, Oskar Groening, will face charges over the 425,000 people believed to have been deported to the camp in occupied Poland between May and July 1944, at least 300,000 of whom were killed in the gas chambers.

Britain is to build a new Holocaust memorial in central London to which the government will contribute £50 million (67 million euros, $75 million), ministers said Tuesday. 

The memorial will be built along with an education center in a bid to ensure that the lessons of World War II's mass killing of Jews by the Nazis are never forgotten.

Poland "respects and recognizes" the role of the Soviet Red Army in liberating the Auschwitz death camp 70 years ago, Polish President Bronislaw Komorowski said at a ceremony Tuesday.

Komorowski also drew a parallel between "two totalitarianism", Germany's Nazi regime and the Soviet system, and recalled the massacre of Polish elites by Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin.

Poland's Catholic Church on Friday made an unprecedented appeal to its followers to help preserve the heritage of the once vibrant Polish Jewish community wiped out by Nazi Germany.

"The history of Polish Jews is an integral part of our country's heritage. Poland was a common home for different people of different faiths," the Polish Episcopal Conference said in a statement from its Jewish dialogue committee.

Poland's foreign ministry said Sunday it was repatriating nearly 200 Polish nationals from separatist regions of Ukraine in the grip of an armed conflict.

"The evacuation of these people from the Donetsk region has entered its decisive phase," said Konrad Pawlik, the deputy foreign minister.

Poland's defense minister said Thursday he was concerned by the extent of Russia's recent military activity over the Baltic sea.

Poland's former president publicly acknowledged for the first time Wednesday that his country hosted a secret CIA prison where a U.S. Senate report says torture was used against al-Qaida suspects.

Aleksander Kwasniewski said that as president he put pressure on the United States to end brutal CIA interrogation at the secret prison on Polish soil in 2003.

Former Polish premier Donald Tusk took over as European Council president Monday promising "ruthless determination" to revive the economy and to defend the EU against both external and internal threats.

Tusk -- the first person from the former Soviet-dominated east to take a top EU role, at a time of tension with Russia -- told a handover ceremony with his predecessor Herman Van Rompuy that the bloc faced a challenge from "enemies".

Polish voters cast ballots in local elections Sunday with a wariness brought on by technical hitches and opposition accusations of fraud in the first round held two weeks ago.

Analysts were concerned that turnout for the polls, to choose 890 mayors across the big EU country, would be even lower than usual because of the allegations.