LODZ, Poland (AP) — Aging Holocaust survivors gathered Thursday to commemorate the 65th anniversary of the last deportations from the Lodz ghetto to Nazi death camps, while Poland’s president recalled their suffering and praised the heroism of Poles who risked their lives to save Jews.

Polish President Lech Kaczynski dedicated a memorial ; incorporating a Polish eagle into a Star of David, that his office said is the first in the world to commemorate those Polish Christians who rescued their Jewish neighbors during the more than five years of Nazi Germany’s occupation of Poland.

Lodz was the second-largest city in prewar Poland, after Warsaw, and home to the second-largest Jewish population, with 231,000 Jews representing more than one-third of the city’s population.

“The liquidation of the Lodz ghetto, the murder of some 70,000 people, was the last act in the annihilation of Poland’s Jews, who have lived here at least since the 12th century,’’ Kaczynski told a crowd of hundreds, many who had come from as far as Los Angeles, California, and Haifa, Israel.

“Today we honor those who were killed and those who survived and those who; showing the greatest courage, saved their fellow citizens.’’

Thursday’s commemorations began at the aging brown wooden Radegast train station, where 150,000 Jews began their final journey to Nazi death camps. Wooden cattle cars with flaking rust-colored paint, still stamped with the Nazi-era “Deutsche Reichsbahn,’’ sit in the station as grim reminders of the death trains.

Kasimira Rosmarinowsky, 86, a survivor who lives in Germany, said she attended the ceremonies to honor her parents and 142 other relatives killed in the Holocaust because she has no graves to visit.